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MR. PROHACK
BY
ARNOLD BENNETT
Author of "Clayhanger," etc.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE NEW POOR
II FROM THE DEAD
III THE LAW
IV EVE'S HEADACHE
V CHARLIE
VI SISSIE
VII THE SYMPATHETIC QUACK
VIII SISSIE'S BUSINESS
IX COLLISION
X THE THEORY OF IDLENESS
XI NEURASTHENIA CURED
XII THE PRACTICE OF IDLENESS
XIII FURTHER IDLENESS
XIV END OF AN IDLE DAY
XV THE HEAVY FATHER
XVI TRANSFER OF MIMI
XVII ROMANCE
XVIII A HOMELESS NIGHT
XIX THE RECEPTION
XX THE SILENT TOWER
XXI EVE'S MARTYRDOM
XXII MR. PROHACK'S TRIUMPH
XXIII THE YACHT
CHAPTER I
THE NEW POOR
I
Arthur Charles Prohack came downstairs at eight thirty, as usual, and
found breakfast ready in the empty dining-room. This pleased him,
because there was nothing in life he hated more than to be hurried. For
him, hell was a place of which the inhabitants always had an eye on the
clock and the clock was always further advanced than they had hoped.
The dining-room, simply furnished with reproductions of chaste
Chippendale, and chilled to the uncomfortable low temperature that hardy
Britons pretend to enjoy, formed part of an unassailably correct house
of mid-Victorian style and antiquity; and the house formed part of an
unassailably correct square just behind Hyde Park Gardens.
(Taxi-drivers, when told the name of the square, had to reflect for a
fifth of a second before they could recall its exact situation.)
Mr. Prohack was a fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a
beard. His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an
ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature. He was forty-six
years of age and looked it. He had been for more than twenty years at
the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain
importance. He was a Companion of the Bath. He exulted in the fact that
the Order of the Bath took precedence of those bumptious Orders, Star of
India, St. Michael and St. George, Indian Empire, Royal Victorian and
British Empire; but he laughed at his wife for so exulting. If the
matter happened to be mentioned he would point out that in the table of
precedence Companions of the Bath ranked immediately below Masters in
Lunacy.
He was proud of the Treasury's war record. Other departments of State
had swollen to amazing dimensions during the war. The Treasury, while
its work had been multiplied a hundredfold, had increased its personnel
by only a negligible percentage. It was the cheapest of all the
departments, the most efficient, and the most powerful. The War Office,
the Admiralty, and perhaps one other department presided over by a
personality whom the Prime Minister feared, did certainly defy and even
ignore the Treasury. But the remaining departments (and especially the
"mushroom ministries") might scheme as much as they liked,--they could
do nothing until the Treasury had approved their enterprises. Modest Mr.
Prohack was among the chief arbiters of destiny for them. He had daily
sat in a chair by himself and approved or disapproved according to his
conscience and the rules of the Exchequer; and his fiats, in practice,
had gone forth as the fiats of the Treasury. Moreover he could not be
bullied, for he was full of the sense that the whole constitution and
moral force of the British Empire stood waiting to back him. Scarcely
known beyond the Treasury, within the Treasury he had acquired a
reputation as "the terror of the departments." Several times irritated
Ministers or their high subordinates had protested that the Treasury's
(Mr. Prohack's) passion for rules, its demands for scientific evidence,
and its sceptical disposition were losing the war. Mr. Prohack had, in
effect retorted: "Departmentally considered, losing the war is a
detail." He had retorted: "Wild cats will not win the war." And he had
retorted: "I know nothing but my duty."
In the end the war was not lost, and Mr. Prohack reckoned that he
personally, by the exercise of courage in the face of grave danger, had
saved to the country five hundred and forty-six millions of the
country's money. At any rate he had exercised a real influence over the
conduct of the war. On one occasion, a chief being absent, he had had to
answer a summons to the Inner Cabinet. Of this occasion he had remarked
to his excited wife: "They were far more nervous than I was."
Despite all this, the great public had never heard of him. His portrait
had never appeared in the illustrated papers. His wife's portrait, as
"War-worker and wife of a great official," had never appeared in the
illustrated papers. No character sketch of him had ever been printed.
His opinions on any subject had never been telephonically or otherwise
demanded by the editors of up-to-date dailies. His news-value indeed was
absolutely nil. In _Who's Who_ he had only four lines of space.
Mr. Prohack's breakfast consisted of bacon, dry toast, coffee,
marmalade, _The Times_ and _The Daily Picture_. The latter was full of
brides and bridegrooms, football, enigmatic murder trials, young women
in their fluffy underclothes, medicines, pugilists, cinema stars, the
biggest pumpkin of the season, uplift, and inspired prophecy concerning
horses and company shares; together with a few brief unillustrated notes
about civil war in Ireland, famine in Central Europe, and the collapse
of realms.
II
"Ah! So I've caught you!" said his wife, coming brightly into the room.
She was a buxom woman of forty-three. Her black hair was elaborately
done for the day, but she wore a roomy peignoir instead of a frock; it
was Chinese, in the Imperial yellow, inconceivably embroidered with
flora, fauna, and grotesques. She always thus visited her husband at
breakfast, picking bits off his plate like a bird, and proving to him
that her chief preoccupation was ever his well-being and the
satisfaction of his capricious tastes.
"Many years ago," said Mr. Prohack.
"You make a fuss about buying _The Daily Picture_ for me. You say it
humiliates you to see it in the house, and I don't know what. But I
catch you reading it yourself, and before you've opened _The Times_!
Dear, dear! That bacon's a cinder and I daren't say anything to her."
"Lady," replied Mr. Prohack, "we all have something base in our natures.
Sin springs from opportunity. I cannot resist the damned paper." And he
stuck his fork into the fair frock-coat of a fatuous bridegroom coming
out of church.
"My fault again!" the wife remarked brightly.
The husband changed the subject:
"I suppose that your son and daughter are still asleep?"
"Well, dearest, you know that they were both at that dance last night."
"They ought not to have been. The popular idea that life is a shimmy is
a dangerous illusion." Mr. Prohack felt the epigram to be third-rate,
but he carried it off lightly.
"Sissie only went because Charlie wanted to go, and all I can say is
that it's a nice thing if Charlie isn't to be allowed to enjoy himself
now the war's over--after all he's been through."
"You're mixing up two quite different things. I bet that if Charlie
committed murder you'd go into the witness-box and tell the judge he'd
been wounded twice and won the Military Cross."
"This is one of your pernickety mornings."
"Seeing that your debauched children woke me up at three fifteen--!"
"They woke me up too."
"That's different. You can go to sleep again. I can't. You rather like
being wakened up, because you take a positively sensual pleasure in
turning over and going to sleep again."
"You hate me for that."
"I do."
"I make you very unhappy sometimes, don't I?"
"Eve, you are a confounded liar, and you know it. You have never caused
me a moment's unhappiness. You may annoy me. You may exasperate me. You
are frequently unspeakable. But you have never made me unhappy. And why?
Because I am one of the few exponents of romantic passion left in this
city. My passion for you transcends my reason. I am a fool, but I am a
magnificent fool. And the greatest miracle of modern times is that after
twenty-four years of marriage you should be able to give me pleasure by
perching your stout body on the arm of my chair as you are doing."
"Arthur, I'm not stout."
"Yes, you are. You're enormous. But hang it, I'm such a morbid fool I
like you enormous."
Mrs. Prohack, smiling mysteriously, remarked in a casual tone, as she
looked at _The Daily Picture_:
"Why _do_ people let their photographs get into the papers? It's awfully
vulgar."
"It is. But we're all vulgar to-day. Look at that!" He pointed to the
page. "The granddaughter of a duke who refused the hand of a princess
sells her name and her face to a firm of ship-owners who keep newspapers
like their grandfathers kept pigeons.... But perhaps I'm only making a
noise like a man of fifty."
"You aren't fifty."
"I'm five hundred. And this coffee is remarkably thin."
"Let me taste it."
"Yes, you'd rob me of my coffee now!" said Mr. Prohack, surrendering his
cup. "Is it thin, or isn't it? I pride myself on living the higher life;
my stomach is not my inexorable deity; but even on the mountain top
which I inhabit there must be a limit to the thinness of the coffee."
Eve (as he called her, after the mother and prototype of all women--her
earthly name was Marian) sipped the coffee. She wrinkled her forehead
and then glanced at him in trouble.
"Yes, it's thin," she said. "But I've had to ration the cook. Oh,
Arthur, I _am_ going to make you unhappy after all. It's impossible for
me to manage any longer on the housekeeping allowance."
"Why didn't you tell me before, child?"
"I have told you 'before,'" said she. "If you hadn't happened to mention
the coffee, I mightn't have said anything for another fortnight. You
started to give me more money in June, and you said that was the utmost
limit you could go to, and I believed it was. But it isn't enough. I
hate to bother you, and I feel ashamed--"
"That's ridiculous. Why should you feel ashamed?"
"Well, I'm like that."
"You're revelling in your own virtuousness, my girl. Now in last week's
_Economist_ it said that the Index Number of commodity prices had
slightly fallen these last few weeks."
"I don't know anything about indexes and the _Economist_," Eve retorted.
"But I know what coffee is a pound, and I know what the tradesmen's
books are--"
At this point she cried without warning.
"No," murmured Mr. Prohack, soothingly, caressingly. "You mustn't
baptise me. I couldn't bear it." And he kissed her eyes.
III
"I _know_ we can't afford any more for housekeeping," she whispered,
sniffing damply. "And I'm ashamed I can't manage, and I knew I should
make you unhappy. What with idle and greedy working-men, and all these
profiteers...! It's a shame!"
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "It's what our Charlie fought for, and got
wounded twice for, and won the M.C. for. That's what it is. But you see
we're the famous salaried middle-class that you read so much about in
the papers, and we're going through the famous process of being crushed
between the famous upper and nether millstones. Those millstones have
been approaching each other--and us--for some time. Now they've begun to
nip. That funny feeling in your inside that's causing you still to
baptise me, in spite of my protest--that's the first real nip."
She caught her breath.
"Arthur," she said. "If you go on like that I shall scream."
"Do," Mr. Prohack encouraged her. "But of course not too loud. At the
same time don't forget that I'm a humourist. Humourists make jokes when
they're happy, and when they're unhappy they make jokes."
"But it's horribly serious."
"Horribly."
Mrs. Prohack slipped off the arm of the chair. Her body seemed to
vibrate within the Chinese gown, and she effervesced into an ascending
and descending series of sustained laughs.
"That's hysteria," said Mr. Prohack. "And if you don't stop I shall be
reluctantly compelled to throw the coffee over you. Water would be
better, but there is none."
Then Eve ceased suddenly.
"To think," she remarked with calmness, "that you're called the Terror
of the Departments, and you're a great authority on finance, and you've
been in the Government service for nearly twenty-five years, and always
done your duty--"
"Child," Mr. Prohack interrupted her. "Don't tell me what I know. And
try not to be surprised at any earthly phenomena. There are people who
are always being astonished by the most familiar things. They live on
earth as if they'd just dropped from Mars on to a poor foreign planet.
It's not a sign of commonsense. You've lived on earth now for--shall we
say?--some twenty-nine or thirty years, and if you don't know the place
you ought to. I assure you that there is nothing at all unusual in our
case. We are perfectly innocent; we are even praiseworthy; and yet--we
shall have to suffer. It's quite a common case. You've read of thousands
and millions of such cases; you've heard of lots personally; and you've
actually met a few. Well, now, you yourself _are_ a case. That's all."
Mrs. Prohack said impatiently:
"I consider the Government's treated you shamefully. Why, we're much
worse off than we were before the war."
"The Government has treated me shamefully. But then it's treated
hundreds of thousands of men shamefully. All Governments do."
"But we have a position to keep up!"
"True. That's where the honest poor have the advantage of us. You see,
we're the dishonest poor. We've been to the same schools and
universities and we talk the same idiom and we have the same manners and
like the same things as people who spend more in a month or a week than
we spend in a year. And we pretend, and they pretend, that they and we
are exactly the same. We aren't, you know. We're one vast pretence. Has
it occurred to you, lady, that we've never possessed a motor-car and
most certainly never shall possess one? Yet look at the hundreds of
thousands of cars in London alone! And not a single one of them ours!
This detail may have escaped you."
"I wish you wouldn't be silly, Arthur."
"I am not silly. On the contrary, my real opinion is that I'm the wisest
man you ever met in your life--not excepting your son It remains that
we're a pretence. A pretence resembles a bladder. It may burst. We
probably shall burst. Still, we have one great advantage over the honest
poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who
never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. _We know exactly
where we are_. We know to the nearest sixpence."
"I don't see that that helps us. I consider the Government has treated
you shamefully. I wonder you important men in the Treasury haven't
formed a Trade Union before now."
"Oh, Eve! After all you've said about Trade Unions this last year! You
shock me! We shall never he properly treated until we do form a Trade
Union. But we shall never form a Trade Union, because we're too proud.
And we'd sooner see our children starve than yield in our pride. That's
a fact."
"There's one thing--we can't move into a cheaper house."
"No," Mr. Prohack concurred. "Because there isn't one."
Years earlier Mr. Prohack had bought the long lease of his house from
the old man who, according to the logical London system, had built the
house upon somebody else's land on the condition that he paid rent for
the land and in addition gave the house to the somebody else at the end
of a certain period as a free gift. By a payment of twelve pounds per
annum Mr. Prohack was safe for forty years yet and he calculated that in
forty years the ownership of the house would be a matter of some
indifference both to him and to his wife.
"Well, as you're so desperately wise, perhaps you'll kindly tell me what
we _are_ to do."
"I might borrow money on my insurance policy--and speculate," said Mr.
Prohack gravely.
"Oh! Arthur! Do you really think you--" Marian showed a wild gleam of
hope.
"Or I might throw the money into the Serpentine," Mr. Prohack added.
"Oh! Arthur! I could kill you. I never know how to take you."
"No, you never do. That's the worst of a woman like you marrying a man
like me."
They discussed devices. One servant fewer. No holiday. Cinemas instead
of theatres. No books. No cigarettes. No taxis. No clothes. No meat. No
telephone. No friends. They reached no conclusion. Eve referred to
Adam's great Treasury mind. Adam said that his great Treasury mind
should function on the problem during the day, and further that the
problem must be solved that very night.
"I'll tell you one thing I shall do," said Mrs. Prohack in a decided
tone as Mr. Prohack left the table. "I shall countermand Sissie'a new
frock."
"If you do I shall divorce you," was the reply.
"But why?"
Mr. Prohack answered:
"In 1917 I saw that girl in dirty overalls driving a thundering great
van down Whitehall. Yesterday I met her in her foolish high heels and
her shocking openwork stockings and her negligible dress and her exposed
throat and her fur stole, and she was so delicious and so absurd and so
futile and so sure of her power that--that--well, you aren't going to
countermand any new frock. That chit has the right to ruin me--not
because of anything she's done, but because she _is_. I am ready to
commit peccadilloes, but not crimes. Good morning, my dove."
And at the door, discreetly hiding her Chinese raiment behind the door,
Eve said, as if she had only just thought of it, though she had been
thinking of it for quite a quarter of an hour:
"Darling, there's your clubs."
"What about my clubs?"
"Don't they cost you a lot of money?"
"No. Besides I lunch at my clubs--better and cheaper than at any
restaurant. And I shouldn't have time to come home for lunch."
"But do you need two clubs?"
"I've always belonged to two clubs. Every one does."
"But why _two_?"
"A fellow must have a club up his sleeve."
"_Couldn't_ you give up one?"
"Lady, it's unthinkable. You don't know what you're suggesting. Abandon
one of my clubs that my father put me up for when I was a boy! I'd as
soon join a Trade Union. No! My innocent but gluttonous children shall
starve first."
"I shall give up _my_ club!"
"Ah! But that's different."
"How is it different?" "You scarcely ever speak to a soul in your club.
The food's bad in your club. They drink liqueurs before dinner at your
club. I've seen 'em. Your club's full every night of the most formidable
spinsters each eating at a table alone. Give up your club by all means.
Set fire to it and burn it down. But don't count the act as a
renunciation. You hate your club. Good morning, my dove."
IV
One advantage of the situation of Mr. Prohack's house was that his path
therefrom to the Treasury lay almost entirely through verdant
parks--Hyde Park, the Green Park, St. James's Park. Not infrequently he
referred to the advantage in terms of bland satisfaction. True, in wet
weather the advantage became a disadvantage.
During his walk through verdant parks that morning, the Terror of the
Departments who habitually thought in millions was very gloomy.
Something resembling death was in his heart. Humiliation also was
certainly in his heart, for he felt that, no matter whose the fault, he
was failing in the first duty of a man. He raged against the Chancellor
of the Exchequer. He sliced off the head of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer with his stick. (But it was only an innocent autumn
wildflower, perilously blooming.) And the tang in the air foretold the
approach of winter and the grip of winter--the hell of the poor.
Near Whitehall he saw the advertisement of a firm of shop-specialists:
"BRING YOUR BUSINESS TROUBLES TO US."
CHAPTER II
FROM THE DEAD
I
"WELL, Milton, had a good holiday?" said Mr. Prohack to the hall-porter
on entering his chief club for lunch that day.
"No, sir," said the hall-porter, who was a realist.
"Ah, well," said Mr. Prohack soothingly. "Perhaps not a bad thing.
There's nothing like an unsatisfactory holiday for reconciling us all to
a life of toil, is there?"
"No, sir," said Milton, impassively, and added: "Mr. Bishop has just
called to see you, sir. I told him you'd probably be in shortly. He said
he wouldn't wait but he might look in again."
"Thanks," said Mr. Prohack. "If he does, I shall be either in the
coffee-room or upstairs."
Mr. Prohack walked into the majestic interior of the Club, which had
been closed, rather later than usual, for its annual cleaning. He
savoured anew and more sharply the beauty and stateliness of its
architecture, the elaboration of its conveniences, the severe splendour
of its luxury. And he saw familiar and congenial faces, and on every
face was a mild joy similar to the joy which he himself experienced in
the reopening of the Club. And he was deliciously aware of the "club
feeling," unlike, and more agreeable than, any other atmosphere of an
organism in the world.
The Club took no time at all to get into its stride after the closure.
It opened its doors and was instantly its full self. For hundreds of
grave men in and near London had risen that very morning from their beds
uplifted by the radiant thought: "To-day I can go to the Club again."
Mr. Prohack had long held that the noblest, the most civilised
achievement of the British character was not the British Empire, nor the
House of Commons, nor the steam-engine, nor aniline dyes, nor the
music-hall, but a good West End club. And somehow at the doors of a good
West End club there was an invisible magic sieve, through which the
human body could pass but through which human worries could not pass.
This morning, however, Mr. Prohack perceived that one worry could pass
through the sieve, namely a worry concerning the Club itself.... Give
up the Club? Was the sacrifice to be consummated? Impossible! Could he
picture himself strolling down St. James's Street without the right to
enter the sacred gates--save as a guest? And supposing he entered as a
guest, could he bear the hall-porter to say to him: "If you'll take a
seat, sir, I'll send and see if Mr. Blank is in the Club. What name,
sir?" Impossible! Yet Milton would be capable of saying just that.
Milton would never pardon a defection.... Well, then, he must give up
the other club. But the other--and smaller--Club had great qualities of
its own. Indeed it was indispensable. And could he permit the day to
dawn on which he would no longer be entitled to refer to "my other
club"? Impossible! Nevertheless he had decided to give up his other
club. He must give it up, if only to keep even with his wife. The
monetary saving would be unimportant, but the act would be spectacular.
And Mr. Prohack perfectly comprehended the value of the spectacular in
existence.
II
He sat down to lunch among half a dozen cronies at one of the larger
tables in a window-embrasure of the vaulted coffee-room with its
precious portrait of that historic clubman, Charles James Fox, and he
ordered himself the cheapest meal that the menu could offer, and poured
himself out a glass of water.
"Same old menu!" remarked savagely Mr. Prohack's great crony, Sir Paul
Spinner, the banker, who suffered from carbuncles and who always drove
over from the city in the middle of the day.
"Here's old Paul grumbling again!" said Sims of Downing Street. "After
all, this is the best club in London."
"It certainly is," said Mr. Prohack, "when it's closed. During the past
four weeks this club has been the most perfect institution on the face
of the earth."
They all laughed. And they began recounting to each other the
unparalleled miseries and indignities which such of them as had remained
in London had had to endure in the clubs that had "extended their
hospitality" to members of the closed club. The catalogue of ills was
terrible. Yes, there was only one club deserving of the name.
"Still," said Sir Paul. "They might give us a rest from prunes and
rice."
"This club," said Mr. Prohack, "like all other clubs, is managed by a
committee of Methuselahs who can only digest prunes and rice." And
after a lot more talk about the idiosyncrasies of clubs he said, with a
casual air: "For myself, I belong to too many clubs."
Said Hunter, a fellow official of the Treasury:
"But I thought you only had two clubs, Arthur."
"Only two. But it's one too many. In fact I'm not sure if it isn't two
too many."
"Are you getting disgusted with human nature?" Sims suggested.
"No," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm getting hard up. I've committed the
greatest crime in the world. I've committed poverty. And I feel guilty."
And the truth was that he did feel guilty. He was entirely innocent; he
was a victim; he had left undone nothing that he ought to have done; but
he felt guilty, thus proving that poverty is indeed seriously a crime
and that those who in sardonic jest describe it as a crime are deeper
philosophers than they suppose.
"Never say die," smiled the monocled Mixon, a publisher of scientific
works, and began to inveigh against the Government as an ungrateful and
unscrupulous employer and exploiter of dutiful men in an inferno of
rising prices. But the rest thought Mixon unhappy in his choice of
topic. Hunter of the Treasury said nothing. What was there to say that
would not tend to destroy the true club atmosphere? Even the beloved
Prohack had perhaps failed somewhat in tact. They all understood, they
all mildly sympathised, but they could do no more--particularly in a
miscellaneous assemblage of eight members. No, they felt a certain
constraint; and in a club constraint should be absolutely unknown. Some
of them glanced uneasily about the crowded, chattering room.
III
It was then, that a remarkable coincidence occurred.
"I saw Bishop at Inverness last week," said Sir Paul Spinner to Mr.
Prohack, apropos of nothing whatever. "Seems he's got a big moor this
year in Sutherlandshire. So I suppose he's recovered from his overdose
of shipping shares."
Bishop (Fred Ferrars) was a financier with a cheerful, negligent
attitude towards the insecurities and uncertainties of a speculative
existence. He was also a close friend of Prohack, of Sir Paul, and of
several others at the table, and a member of Prohack's secondary club,
though not of his primary club.
"That's strange," said Mr. Prohack. "I hear he's in London."
"He most positively isn't in London," said Sir Paul. "He's not coming
back until November."
"Then that shows how little the evidence of the senses can be relied
upon," remarked Mr. Prohack gently. "According to the hall-porter he
called here for me a few minutes ago, and he may call again."
The banker grunted. "The deuce he did! Does that mean he's in some fresh
trouble, I wonder?"
At the same moment a page-girl, the smart severity of whose uniform was
mitigated by a pig-tail and a bow of ribbon, approached Mr. Prohack's
chair, and, bending her young head to his ear, delivered to him with the
manner of a bearer of formidable secrets:
"Mr. Bishop to see you, sir."
"There he is!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack. "Now he's bound to want lunch. Why
on earth can't we bring guests in here? Waitress, have the lunch I've
ordered served in the guests' dining-room, please.... No doubt Bishop
and I'll see you chaps upstairs later."
He went off to greet and welcome Bishop, full of joy at the prospect of
tasting anew the rich personality of his old friend. It is true that he
had a qualm about the expense of standing Bishop a lunch--a fellow who
relished his food and drink and could distinguish between the best and
the second best; but on the other hand he could talk very freely to
Bishop concerning the crisis in which he found himself; and he knew that
Bishop would not allow Bishop's affairs, however troublesome they might
be, unduly to bother _him_.
Bishop was not on the bench in the hall where visitors were appointed to
wait. Only one man was on the bench, a spectacled, red-faced person. Mr.
Prohack glanced about. Then the page-girl pointed to the spectacled
person, who jumped up and approached Mr. Prohack somewhat effusively.
"How d'ye do, Prohack?"
"Well, _Bishop_!" Mr. Prohack responded. "It's _you_!"
It was another Bishop, a Bishop whom he had forgotten, a Bishop who had
resigned from the club earlier and disappeared. Mr. Prohack did not like
him. Mr. Prohack said to himself: "This fellow is after something, and I
always knew he was an adventurer."
"Funny feeling it gives you to be asked to wait in the hall of a club
that you used to belong to!" said Bishop.
The apparently simple words, heavy with sinister significance, sank
like a depth-charge into Mr. Prohack's consciousness.
"Among other things," said Mr. Prohack to himself, "this fellow is very
obviously after a free lunch."
Now Mr. Prohack suffered from a strange form of insincerity, which he
had often unsuccessfully tried to cure, partly because it advantaged
unsympathetic acquaintances at his expense, and partly because his wife
produced unanswerable arguments against it with mortal effect. Although
an unconceited man (as men go), and a very honest man, he could not help
pretending to like people whom he did not like. And he pretended with a
histrionic skill that deceived everybody--sometimes even himself. There
may have been some good-nature in this moral twist of his; but he well
knew that it originated chiefly in three morbid desires,--the desire to
please, the desire to do the easiest thing, and the desire to nourish
his reputation for amiability.
So that when the unexpected Mr. Bishop (whose Christian name was Softly)
said to him: "I won't keep you now. Only I was passing and I want you to
be kind enough to make an early appointment with me at some time and
place entirely convenient to yourself," Mr. Prohack proceeded to
persuade Mr. Bishop to stay to lunch, there being no sort of reason in
favour of such a course, and various sound reasons against it. Mr.
Prohack deceived Mr. Softly Bishop as follows:
"No time and place like the present. You must stay to lunch. This is
your old club and you must stay to lunch."
"But you've begun your lunch," Bishop protested.
"I've not. The fact is, I was half expecting you to look in again. The
hall-porter told me...." And Mr. Prohack actually patted Mr. Bishop on
the shoulder--a trick he had. "Come now, don't tell me you've got
another lunch appointment. It's twenty-five to two." And to himself,
leading Mr. Bishop to the strangers' dining-room, he said: "Why should I
further my own execution in this way?"
He ordered a lunch as copious and as costly as he would have ordered for
the other, the real Bishop. Powerful and vigorous in some directions,
Mr. Prohack's mentality was deplorably weak in at least one other.
Mr. Softly Bishop was delighted with his reception, and Mr. Prohack
began to admit that Mr. Bishop had some personal charm. Nevertheless
when the partridge came, Mr. Prohack acidly reflected:
"I'm offering this fellow a portion of my daughter's new frock on a
charger!"
They talked of the club, Mr. Bishop as a former member being surely
entitled to learn all about it, and then they talked about clubs in the
United States, where Mr. Bishop had spent recent years. But Mr. Bishop
persisted in giving no hint of his business.
"It must be something rather big and annoying," thought Mr. Prohack, and
ordered another portion of his daughter's new frock in the shape of
excellent cigars.
"You don't mean to say we can smoke _here_," exclaimed Mr. Bishop.
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Not in the members' coffee-room, but we can
here. Stroke of genius on the part of the Committee! You see it tends to
keep guests out of the smoking-room, which for a long time has been
getting uncomfortably full after lunch."
"Good God!" murmured Mr. Bishop simply.
IV
And he added at once, as he lighted the Corona Corona: "Well, I'd better
tell you what I've come to see you about. You remember that chap, Silas
Angmering?"
"Silas Angmering? Of course I do. Used to belong here. He cleared off to
America ages ago."
"He did. And you lent him a hundred pounds to help him to clear off to
America."
"Who told you?"
"He did," said Mr. Bishop, with a faint, mysterious smile.
"What's happened to him?"
"Oh! All sorts of things. He made a lot of money out of the war. He
established himself in Cincinnati. And there were opportunities...."
"How came he to tell you that I'd lent him anything?" Mr. Prohack
interrupted sharply.
"I had business with him at one time--before the war and also just after
the war began. Indeed I was in partnership with him." Mr. Bishop spoke
with a measured soothing calmness.
"And you say he's made a lot of money out of the war. What do you
mean--a lot?"
"Well," said Mr. Bishop, looking at the tablecloth through his
glittering spectacles, "I mean a _lot_."
His tone was confidential; but then his tone was always confidential.
He continued: "He's lost it all since."
"Pity he didn't pay me back my hundred pounds while he'd got it! How did
he lose his money?"
"In the same way as most rich men lose their money," answered Mr.
Bishop. "He died."
Although Mr. Prohack would have been capable of telling a similar story
in a manner very similar to Mr. Bishop's, he didn't quite relish his
guest's theatricality. It increased his suspicion of his guest, and
checked the growth of friendliness which the lunch had favoured. Still,
he perceived that there was a good chance of getting his hundred pounds
back, possibly with interest--and the interest would mount up to fifty
or sixty pounds. And a hundred and fifty pounds appeared to him to be an
enormous sum. Then it occurred to him that probably Mr. Bishop was not
indeed "after" anything and that he had been unjust to Mr. Bishop.
"Married?" he questioned, casually.
"Angmering? No. He never married. You know as well as anybody, I expect,
what sort of a card he was. No relations, either."
"Then who's come into his money?"
"Well," said Mr. Bishop, with elaborate ease and smoothness of quiet
delivery. "I've come into some of it. And there was a woman--actress
sort of young thing--about whom perhaps the less said the better--she's
come into some of it. And you've come into some of it. We share it in
equal thirds."
"The deuce we do!"
"Yes."
"How long's he been dead?"
"About five weeks or less. I sailed as soon as I could after he was
buried. I'd arranged before to come. I daresay I ought to have stayed a
bit longer, as I'm the executor under the will, but I wanted to come,
and I've got a very good lawyer over there--and over here too. I landed
this morning, and here I am. Strictly speaking I suppose I should have
cabled you. But it seemed to me that I could explain better by word of
mouth."
"I wish you would explain," said Mr. Prohack. "You say he's been rich a
long time, but he didn't pay his debt to me, and yet he goes and makes a
will leaving me a third of his fortune. Wants some explaining, doesn't
it?"
Mr. Bishop replied:
"It does and it doesn't. You knew he was a champion postponer, poor old
chap. Profoundly unbusinesslike. It's astonishing how unbusinesslike
successful men are! He was always meaning to come to England to see you;
but he never found time. He constantly talked of you--"
"But do you know," Mr. Prohack intervened, "that from that day to this
I've never heard one single word from him? Not even a picture-postcard.
And what's more I've never heard a single word _of_ him."
"Just like Silas, that was! Just!... He died from a motor accident. He
was perfectly conscious and knew he'd only a few hours to live. Spine.
He made his will in hospital, and died about a couple of hours after
he'd made it. I wasn't there myself. I was in New York."
"Well, well!" muttered Mr. Prohack. "Poor fellow! Well, well! This is
the most amazing tale I ever heard in my life."
"It _is_ rather strange," Mr. Bishop compassionately admitted.
A silence fell--respectful to the memory of the dead. The members'
coffee-room seemed to Mr. Prohack to be a thousand miles off, and the
chat with his cronies at the table in the window-embrasure to have
happened a thousand years ago. His brain was in anarchy, and waving like
a flag above the anarchy was the question: "How much did old Silas
leave?" But the deceitful fellow would not permit the question to utter
itself,--he had dominion over himself at any rate to that extent. He
would not break the silence; he would hide his intense curiosity; he
would force Softly Bishop to divulge the supreme fact upon his own
initiative.
And at length Mr. Bishop remarked, musingly:
"Yes. Thanks to the exchange being so low, you stand to receive at the
very least a hundred thousand pounds clear--after all deductions have
been made."
"Do I really?" said Mr. Prohack, also musingly.
CHAPTER III
THE LAW
His tranquil tone disguised the immense anarchy within. Silas Angmering
had evidently been what is called a profiteer. He had made his money
"out of the war." And Silas was an Englishman. While Englishmen,
and--later--Americans, had given up lives, sanity, fortunes, limbs,
eyesight, health, Silas had gained riches. There was nothing highly
unusual in this. Mr. Prohack had himself seen, in the very club in which
he was now entertaining Softly Bishop, a man who had left an arm in
France chatting and laughing with a man who had picked up over a million
pounds by following the great principle that a commodity is worth what
it will fetch when people want it very badly and there is a shortage of
it. Mr. Prohack too had often chatted and laughed with this same
picker-up of a million, who happened to be a quite jolly and generous
fellow. Mr. Prohack would have chatted and laughed with Barabbas,
convinced as he was that iniquity is the result of circumstances rather
than of deliberate naughtiness. He seldom condemned. He had greatly
liked Silas Angmering, who was a really educated and a well-intentioned
man with a queer regrettable twist in his composition. That Silas should
have profiteered when he got the chance was natural. Most men would do
the same. Most heroes would do the same. The man with one arm would
conceivably do the same.
But between excusing and forgiving a brigand (who has not despoiled
_you_), and sharing his plunder, there was a gap, a chasm.
Few facts gave Mr. Prohack a more serene and proud satisfaction than the
fact that he had materially lost through the war. He was positively glad
that he had lost, and that the Government, his employer, had treated him
badly.... And now to become the heir of a profiteer! Nor was that all!
To become the co-heir with a woman of dubious renown, and with Mr.
Softly Bishop! He knew nothing about the woman, and would think nothing.
But he knew a little about Mr. Softly Bishop. Mr. Bishop, it used to be
known and said in the club, had never had a friend. He had the usual
number of acquaintances, but no relationship more intimate. Mr. Prohack,
in the old days, had not for a long time actively disliked Mr. Bishop;
but he had been surprised at the amount of active dislike which contact
with Mr. Bishop engendered in other members of the club. Why such
dislike? Was it due to his fat, red face, his spectacles, his
conspiratorial manner, tone and gait, the evenness of his temper, his
cautiousness, his mysteriousness? Nobody knew. In the end Mr. Prohack
also had succeeded in disliking him. But Mr. Prohack produced a reason,
and that reason was Mr. Bishop's first name. On it being pointed out to
Mr. Prohack by argufiers that Mr. Bishop was not responsible for his
first name, Mr. Prohack would reply that the mentality of parents
capable of bestowing on an innocent child the Christian name of Softly
was incomprehensible and in a high degree suspicious, and that therefore
by the well-known laws of heredity there must be something devilish odd
in the mentality of their offspring--especially seeing that the
offspring pretended to glory in the Christian name as being a fine old
English name. No! Mr. Prohack might stomach co-heirship with a far-off
dubious woman; but could he stomach co-heirship with Softly Bishop? It
would necessitate friendship with Mr. Bishop. It would bracket him for
ever with Mr. Bishop.
These various considerations, however, had little to do with the immense
inward anarchy that Mr. Prohack's tone had concealed as he musingly
murmured: "Do I really?" The disturbance was due almost exclusively to a
fierce imperial joy in the prospect of immediate wealth. The origin of
the wealth scarcely affected him. The associations of the wealth
scarcely affected him. He understood in a flash the deep wisdom of that
old proverb (whose truth he had often hitherto denied) that money has no
smell. Perhaps there might be forty good reasons against his accepting
the inheritance, but they were all ridiculous. Was he to abandon his
share of the money to Softly Bishop and the vampire-woman? Such a notion
was idiotic. It was contrary to the robust and matter-of-fact
commonsense which always marked his actions--if not his theories. No
more should his wife be compelled to scheme out painfully the employment
of her housekeeping allowance. Never again should there be a question
about a new frock for his daughter. He was conscious, before anything
else, of a triumphant protective and spoiling tenderness for his women.
He would be absurd with his women. He would ruin their characters with
kindness and with invitations to be capricious and exacting and
expensive and futile. They nobly deserved it. He wanted to shout and to
sing and to tell everybody that he would not in future stand any d----d
nonsense from anybody. He would have his way.
"Why!" thought he, pulling himself up. "I've developed all the
peculiarities of a millionaire in about a minute and a half."
And again, he cried to himself, in the vast and imperfectly explored
jungle that every man calls his heart:
"Ah! I could not have borne to give up either of my clubs! No! I was
deceiving myself. I could not have done it! I could not have done it!
Anything rather than that. I see it now.... By the way, I wonder what
all the fellows will say when they know! And how shall I break it to
them? Not to-day! Not to-day! To-morrow!"
At the moment when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his
ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop
suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to
the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering
estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty called him
elsewhere.
"Does that matter--now?" said Bishop, and his accents were charged with
meaning.
Mr. Prohack saw that it did not matter, and that in future any nation
that did not like his office-hours would have to lump them. He feared
greatly lest he might encounter some crony-member on his way out of the
club with Bishop. If he did, what should he say, how should he carry off
the situation? (For he was feeling mysteriously guilty, just as he had
felt guilty an hour earlier. Not guilty as the inheritor of profiteering
in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor. It might have been
different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say
of five thousand pounds every six months. But a hundred thousand
unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still
in the smoking-room. He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly.
Bishop had a big motor-car waiting at the door.
III
He offered no remark as to the car, and Mr. Prohack offered no remark.
But Mr. Prohack was very interested in the car--he who had never been
interested in cars. And he was interested in the clothes and in the
deportment of the chauffeur. He was indeed interested in all sorts of
new things. The window of a firm of house-agents who specialised in
country houses, the jewellers' shops, the big hotels, the advertisements
of theatres and concerts, the establishments of trunk-makers and of
historic second-hand booksellers and of equally historic wine-merchants.
He saw them all with a fresh eye. London suddenly opened to him its
possibilities as a bud opens its petals.
"Not a bad car they; hired out to me," said Bishop at length, with
casual approval.
"You've hired it?"
"Oh, yes!"
And shortly afterwards Bishop said:
"It's fantastic the number of cars there are in use in America. You know
it's a literal fact that almost every American family has a car. For
instance, whenever there's a big meeting of strikers in New York, all
the streets near the hall are blocked with cars."
Mr. Prohack had food for reflection. His outlook upon life was changed.
And later Bishop said, again apropos of nothing:
"Of course it's only too true that the value of money has fallen by
about half. But on the other hand interest has about doubled. You can
get ten per cent on quite safe security in these days. Even Governments
have to pay about seven--as you know."
"Yes," concurred Mr. Prohack.
Ten thousand pounds a year!
And then he thought:
"What an infernal nuisance it would be if there was a revolution! Oh!
But there couldn't be. It's unthinkable. Revolution everywhere, yes; but
not in England or America!"
And he saw with the most sane and steady insight that the final duty of
a Government was to keep order. Change there must be, but let change
come gradually. Injustices must be remedied, naturally, but without any
upheaval! Yet in the club some of the cronies (and he among them), after
inveighing against profiteers and against the covetousness of trades
unions, had often held that "a good red revolution" was the only way of
knocking sense into the heads of these two classes.
The car got involved in a block of traffic near the Mansion House, and
rain began to fall. The two occupants of the car watched each other
surreptitiously, mutually suspicious, like dogs. Scraps of talk were
separated by long intervals. Mr. Prohack wondered what the deuce Softly
Bishop had done that Angmering should leave him a hundred thousand
pounds. He tried to feel grief for the tragic and untimely death of his
old friend Angmering, and failed. No doubt the failure was due to the
fact that he had not seen Angmering for so many years.
At last Mr. Prohack, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out,
his gaze uplifted, he said suddenly:
"I suppose it'll hold water?"
"What? The roof of the car?"
"No. The will."
Mr. Softly Bishop gave a short laugh, but made no other answer.
IV
The car halted finally before an immense new block of buildings, and the
inheritors floated up to the fifth floor in a padded lift manned by a
brilliantly-uniformed attendant. Mr. Prohack saw "Smathe and Smathe" in
gilt on a glass door. The enquiry office resembled the ante-room of a
restaurant, as the whole building resembled a fashionable hotel.
Everywhere was mosaic flooring.
"Mr. Percy Smathe?" demanded Bishop of a clerk whose head glittered in
the white radiance of a green-shaded lamp.
"I'll see, sir. Please step into the waiting-room." And he waved a
patronising negligent hand. "What name?" he added.
"Have you forgotten my name already?" Mr. Bishop retorted sharply.
"Bishop. Tell Mr. Percy Smathe I'm here. At once, please."
And he led Mr. Prohack to the waiting-room, which was a magnificent
apartment with stained glass windows, furnished in Chippendale similar
to, but much finer than, the furnishing of Mr. Prohack's own house. On
the table were newspapers and periodicals. Not _The Engineering Times_
of April in the previous year or a _Punch_ of the previous decade, and
_The Vaccination Record_; but such things as the current _Tatler, Times,
Economist_, and _La Vie Parisienne._
Mr. Prohack had uncomfortable qualms of apprehension. For several
minutes past he had been thinking: "Suppose there _is_ something up with
that will!" He had little confidence in Mr. Softly Bishop. And now the
aspect of the solicitors' office frightened him. It had happened to him,
being a favourite trustee of his relations and friends, to visit the
offices of some of the first legal firms in Lincoln's Inn Fields. You
entered these lairs by a dirty door and a dirty corridor and another
dirty door. You were interrogated by a shabby clerk who sat on a foul
stool at a foul desk in a foul office. And finally after an interval in
a cubby hole that could not boast even _The Anti-Vaccination Record_,
you were driven along a dirtier passage into a dirtiest room whose
windows were obscured by generations of filth, and in that room sat a
spick and span lawyer of great name who was probably an ex-president of
the Incorporated Law Society. The offices of Smathe and Smathe
corresponded with alarming closeness to Mr. Prohack's idea of what a
bucket-shop might be. Mr. Prohack had the gravest fears for his hundred
thousand pounds.
"This is the solicitor's office new style," said Bishop, who seemed to
have an uncanny gift of reading thoughts. "Very big firm.
Anglo-American. Smathe and Smathe are two cousins. Percy's American.
English mother. They specialise in what I may call the international
complication business, pleasant and unpleasant."
Mr. Prohack was not appreciably reassured. Then a dapper, youngish man
with a carnation in his buttonhole stepped neatly into the room, and
greeted Bishop in a marked American accent.
"Here I am again," said Bishop curtly. "Mr. Prohack, may I introduce Mr.
Percy Smathe?"
"Mr. Prohack, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance."
Mr. Prohack beheld the lawyer's candid, honest face, heard his tones of
extreme deference, and noted that he had come to the enquiry room to
fetch his clients.
"There's only one explanation of this," said Mr. Prohack to himself.
"I'm a genuinely wealthy person."
And in Mr. Percy Smathe's private room he listened but carelessly to a
long legal recital. Details did not interest him. He knew he was all
right.
CHAPTER IV
EVE'S HEADACHE
I
That afternoon Mr. Prohack just got back to his bank before closing
time. He had negligently declined to comprehend a very discreet hint
from Mr. Percy Smathe that if he desired ready money he could have
it--in bulk. Nevertheless he did desire to feel more money than usual in
his pocket, and he satisfied this desire at the bank, where the
September quarter of his annual salary lay almost intact. His bank was
near Hanover Square, a situation inconvenient for him, but he had chosen
that particular branch because its manager happened to be a friend of
his. The Prohack account did no good to the manager personally, and only
infinitesimal good to the vast corporation of which the branch-manager
was the well-dressed, well-spoken serf. The corporation was a sort of
sponge prodigiously absorbent but incapable of being squeezed. The
manager could not be of the slightest use to Mr. Prohack in a financial
crisis, for the reason that he was empowered to give no accommodation
whatever without the consent of the head office. Still, Mr. Prohack,
being a vigorous sentimentalist, as all truly wise men are, liked to
bank with a friend. On the present occasion he saw the branch-manager,
Insott by name, explained that he wanted some advice, and made an
appointment to meet the latter at the latter's club, the Oriental, at
six-thirty.
Thereupon he returned to the Treasury, and from mere high fantasy spread
the interesting news that he had broken a back tooth at lunch and had
had to visit his dentist at Putney. His colleague, Hunter, remarked to
him that he seemed strangely gay for a man with a broken tooth, and Mr.
Prohack answered that a philosopher always had resources of fortitude
within himself. He then winked--a phenomenon hitherto unknown at the
Treasury. He stayed so late at his office that he made the acquaintance
of two charwomen, whom he courteously chaffed. He was defeated in the
subsequent encounter, and acknowledged the fact by two half-crowns.
At the Oriental Club he told Insott that he might soon have some money
to invest; and he was startled and saddened to discover that Insott knew
almost nothing about exciting investments, or about anything at all,
except the rigours of tube travel to Golder's Green. Insott had sunk
into a deplorable groove. When, confidential, Insott told him the salary
of a branch-manager of a vast corporation near Hanover Square, and
incidentally mentioned that a bank-clerk might not marry without the
consent in writing of the vast corporation, Mr. Prohack understood and
pardoned the deep, deplorable groove. Insott could afford a club simply
because his father, the once-celebrated authority on Japanese armour,
had left him a hundred and fifty a year. Compared to the ruck of
branch-managers Insott was a free and easy plutocrat.
As he departed from the Oriental Mr. Prohack sighed: "Poor Insott!" A
sturdy and even exultant cheerfulness was, however, steadily growing in
him. Poor Insott, unaware that he had been talking to a man with an
assured income of ten thousand pounds a year, had unconsciously helped
that man to realise the miracle of his own good fortune.
Mr. Prohack's route home lay through a big residential square or so and
along residential streets of the first quality. All the houses were big,
and they seemed bigger in the faint October mist. It was the hour after
lighting up and before the drawing of blinds and curtains. Mr. Prohack
had glimpses of enormous and magnificent interiors,--some right in the
sky, some on the ground--with carved ceilings, rich candelabra, heavily
framed pictures, mighty furniture, statuary, and superb and nonchalant
menials engaged in the pleasant task of shutting away those interiors
from the vulgar gaze. The spectacle continued furlong upon furlong,
monotonously. There was no end to the succession of palaces of the
wealthy. Then it would be interrupted while Mr. Prohack crossed a main
thoroughfare, where scores of young women struggled against a few men
for places in glittering motor-buses that were already packed with
successful fighters for room in them. And then it would be resumed again
in its majesty.
The sight of the street-travellers took Mr. Prohack's mind back to
Insott. He felt a passionate sympathy for the Insotts of the world, and
also for the Prohacks of six hours earlier. Once Mr. Prohack had been in
easier circumstances; but those circumstances, thanks to the ambitions
of statesmen and generals, and to the simplicity of publics, had
gradually changed from easy to distressed. He saw with terrible
clearness from what fate the Angmering miracle had saved him and his. He
wanted to reconstruct society in the interest of those to whom no
miracle had happened. He wanted to do away with all excessive wealth;
and by "excessive" he meant any degree of wealth beyond what would be
needed for the perfect comfort of himself, Mr. Prohack,--a reasonable
man if ever there was one! Ought he not to devote his fortune to the
great cause of reconstructing society? Could he enjoy his fortune while
society remain unreconstructed? Well, societies were not to be
reconstructed by the devoting of fortunes to the work. Moreover, if he
followed such an extreme course he would be regarded as a crank, and he
could not have borne to be regarded as a crank. He detested cranks more
than murderers or even profiteers. As for enjoying his fortune in
present circumstances, he thought that he might succeed in doing so, and
that anyhow it was his duty to try. He was regrettably inconsistent.
II
Having entered his house as it were surreptitiously, and avoided his
children, Mr. Prohack peeped through the half-open door between the
conjugal bedroom and the small adjoining room, which should Lave been a
dressing-room, but which Mrs. Prohack styled her boudoir. He espied her
standing sideways in front of the long mirror, her body prettily curved
and her head twisted over her shoulder so that she could see
three-quarters of her back in the mirror. An attitude familiar to Mr.
Prohack and one that he liked! She was wearing the Chinese garment of
the morning, but he perceived that she had done something to it. He made
a sharp noise with the handle of the door. She shrieked and started, and
as soon as she had recovered she upbraided him, and as soon as she had
upbraided him she asked him anxiously what he thought of the robe,
explaining that it was really too good for a dressing-gown, that with
careful treatment it would wear for ever, that it could not have been
bought now for a hundred pounds or at least eighty, that it was in
essence far superior to many frocks worn by women who had more money and
less taste than herself, that she had transformed it into a dinner-dress
for quiet evenings at home, and that she had done this as part of her
part of the new economy scheme. It would save all her other frocks, and
as for a dressing-gown, she had two old ones in her reserves.
Mr. Prohack kissed her and told her to sit down on the little sofa.
"To see the effect of it sitting down?" she asked.
"If you like," said he.
"Then you don't care for it? You think it's ridiculous?" said she
anxiously, when she had sat down.
He replied, standing in front of her:
"You know that Oxford Concise Dictionary that I bought just before the
war? Where is it?"
"Arthur!" she said. "What's the matter with you? You look so queer. I
suppose the dictionary's where you keep it. _I_ never touch it."
"I want you to be sure to remind me to cross the word 'economy' out of
it to-night. In fact I think I'd better tear out the whole page."
"Arthur!" she exclaimed again. "Are you ill? Has anything serious
happened? I warn you I can't stand much more to-day."
"Something very serious has happened," answered the incorrigible Mr.
Prohack. "It may be all for the best; it may be all for the worst.
Depends how you look at it. Anyway I'm determined to tell you. Of course
I shouldn't dream of telling anybody else until I'd told you." He seated
himself by her side. There was just space enough for the two of them on
the sofa.
"Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Prohack, with apprehension, and instinctively
she stretched her arm out and extinguished one of the lights.
He had been touched by her manoeuvre, half economy and half coquetry,
with the Chinese dress. He was still more touched by the gesture of
extinguishing a light. For a year or two past Mrs. Prohack had been
putting forward a theory that an average degree of illumination tried
her eyes, and the household was now accustomed to twilit rooms in the
evening. Mr. Prohack knew that the recent taste for obscurity had
nothing to do with her eyes and everything to do with her years, but he
pretended to be deceived by her duplicity. Not for millions would he
have given her cause to suspect that he was not perfectly deceived. He
understood and sympathised with her in all her manifestations. He did
not select choice pieces of her character for liking, and dislike or
disapprove of the rest. He took her undivided, unchipped, and liked the
whole of her. It was very strange.
When he married her he had assumed, but was not sure, that he loved her.
For thirteen or fourteen years she had endangered the bond between them
by what seemed to him to be her caprices, illogicalities, perversities,
and had saved it by her charming demonstrations of affection. During
this period he had remained as it were neutral--an impassive spectator
of her union with a man who happened to be himself. He had observed and
weighed all her faults, and had concluded that she was not worse than
other wives whom he respected. He continued to wonder what it was that
held them together. At length, and very slowly indeed, he had begun to
have a revelation, not of her but of himself. He guessed that he must be
profoundly in love with her and that his original assumption was much
more than accurate,--it was a bull's-eye. His love developed into a
passion, not one of your eruptive, scalding affairs, but something as
placid as an English landscape, with white heat far, far below the
surface.
He felt how fine and amusing it was to have a genuine, incurable,
illogical passion for a woman,--a passion that was almost an instinct.
He deliberately cultivated it and dwelt on it and enjoyed it. He liked
reflecting upon it. He esteemed that it must be about the most
satisfying experience in the entire realm of sentiment, and that no
other earthly experience of any sort could approach it. He made this
discovery for himself, with the same sensations as if he had discovered
a new star or the circulation of the blood. Of course he knew that
two-thirds of the imaginative literature of the world was based on, and
illustrative of, this great human discovery, and therefore that he was
not exactly a pioneer. No matter! He was a pioneer all the same.
"Do you remember a fellow named Angmering?" he began, on a note of the
closest confiding intimacy--a note which always flattered and delighted
his wife.
"Yes."
"What was he like?"
"Wasn't he the man that started to run away with Ronnie Philps' wife and
thought better of it and got her out of the train at Crewe and put her
into the London train that was standing at the other platform and left
her without a ticket? Was it Crewe or Rugby--I forget which?"
"No, no. You're all mixed up. That wasn't Angmering."
"Well, you have such funny friends, darling. Tell me, then."
"Angmering never ran away with anybody except himself. He went to
America and before he left I lent him a hundred pounds."
"Arthur, I'll swear you never told me that at the time. In fact you
always said positively you wouldn't lend money to anybody. You promised
me. I hope he's paid you back."
"He hasn't. And I've just heard he's dead."
"I felt that was coming. Yes. I knew from the moment you began to talk
that it was something of that kind. And just when we could do with that
hundred pounds--heaven knows! Oh, Arthur!"
"He's dead," said Mr. Prohack clinchingly, "but he's left me ten
thousand a year. Ha, ha!--Ha, ha!" He put his hand on her soft shoulder
and gave a triumphant wink.
* * * * *
III
"Dollars, naturally," said Mrs. Prohack, after listening to various
romantic details.
"No, pounds."
"And do you believe it? Are you sure this man Bishop isn't up to some
game? You know anybody can get the better of you, sweetest."
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "I know I'm the greatest and sweetest imbecile
that the Almighty ever created. But I believe it."
"But _why_ should he leave you all this money? It doesn't stand to
reason."
"It doesn't. But you see the poor fellow had to leave it to _some_ one.
And he'd no time to think. I expect he just did the first thing that
came into his head and was glad to get it over. I daresay he rather
enjoyed doing it, even if he was in great pain, which I don't think he
was."
"And who do you say the woman is that's got as much as you have?"
"I don't say because I don't know."
"I guarantee _she_ hadn't lent him a hundred pounds," said Mrs. Prohack
with finality. "And you can talk as long as you like about real property
in Cincinnati--what is real property? Isn't all property real?--I shall
begin to believe in the fortune the day you give me a pearl necklace
worth a thousand pounds. And not before."
"Lady," replied Mr. Prohack, "then I will never give you a pearl
necklace."
Mrs. Prohack laughed.
"I know that," she said.
After a long meditative pause which her husband did not interrupt, she
murmured: "So I suppose we shall be what you call rich?"
"Some people will undoubtedly call us rich. Others won't."
"You know we shan't be any happier," she warned him.
"No," Mr. Prohack agreed. "It's a great trial, besides being a great
bore. But we must stick it."
"_I_ shan't be any different. So you mustn't expect it."
"I never have expected it."
"I wonder what the children will say. Now, Arthur, don't go and tell
them at dinner while the maid's there. I think I'll fetch them up now."
"You'll do nothing of the kind," said Mr. Prohack sharply.
"Why not?"
"Because I can't stand the strain of telling them to-night. Ha-ha!" He
laughed. "I intend to think things over and tell them to-morrow. I've
had quite enough strain for one day."
"Strain, darling?"
"Strain. These extremes of heat and cold would try a stronger man than
me."
"Extremes of heat and cold, darling?"
"Well, just think how cold it was this morning and how warm it is
to-night."
"You quaint boy!" she murmured, admiring him. "I quite understand.
Quite. How sensitive you are! But then you always were. Now listen here.
Shall _I_ tell the children?" She gave him a long kiss.
"No," said he, making prods at her cheek with his finger, and smiling
vaguely. "No. You'll do nothing of the kind. But there's something you
_can_ do for me."
"Yes?"
"Will you do it?"
"Yes."
"Whatever it is?"
"If you aren't going to play a trick on me."
"No. It's no trick.
"Very well, then."
"First, you must have one of your best headaches. Second, you must go to
bed at once. Third, you must sprinkle some eau-de-cologne on the bed, to
deceive the lower orders. Fourth, you must be content with some soup for
your dinner, and I'll smuggle you up some dessert in my pocket if you're
hungry. Fifth, you must send word to those children of yours that you
don't wish to be disturbed."
"But you want to treat me like a baby."
"And supposing I do! For once, can't you be a baby to oblige me?"
"But it's too ridiculous! Why do you want me to go to bed?"
"You know why. Still, I'll tell you. You always like to be told what you
know,--for instance, that I'm in love with you. I can't tell those kids
to-night, and I'm not going to. The rumpus, the conflict of ideas, the
atmospheric disturbance when they do get to know will be terrific, and
I simply won't have it to-night. I must have a quiet evening to think in
or else I shan't sleep. On the other hand, do you suppose I could sit
through dinner opposite you, and you knowing all about it and me knowing
all about it, and both of us pretending that there was nothing unusual
in the air? It's impossible. Either you'd give the show away, or I
should. Or I should burst out laughing. No! I can manage the situation
alone, but I can't manage it if you're there. Hence, lady, you will keep
your kind promise and hop into bed."
Without another word, but smiling in a most enigmatic manner, Mrs.
Prohack passed into the bedroom. The tyrant lit a cigarette, and
stretched himself all over the sofa. He thought:
"She's a great woman. She understands. Or at any rate she acts as if she
did. Now how many women in similar circumstances would have--" Etc. Etc.
He listened to her movements. He had not told her everything, for
example, the profiteering origin of the fortune, and he wondered whether
he had behaved quite nicely in not doing so.
"Arthur," she called from the bedroom.
"Hullo?"
"I do think this is really too silly."
"You're not paid to think, my girl."
A pause.
"Arthur," she called from the bedroom.
"Hullo?"
"You're sure you won't blurt it out to them when I'm not there?"
He only replied: "I'm sorry you've got such a frightful headache,
Marian. You wouldn't have these headaches if you took my advice."
A pause.
"I'm in bed."
"All right. Stay there."
When he had finished his cigarette, he went into the bedroom. Yes, she
was veritably in bed.
"You are a pig, Arthur. I wonder how many wives--"
He put his hand over her mouth.
"Stop," he said. "I'm not like you. I don't need to be told what I know
already."
"But really--!" She dropped her head on one side and began to laugh, and
continued to laugh, rather hysterically, until she could not laugh any
more. "Oh, dear! We are the queerest pair!"
"It is possible," said he. "You're forgotten the eau-de-cologne." He
handed her the bottle. "It is quite possible that we're the queerest
pair, but this is a very serious day in the history of the Prohack
family. The Prohack family has been starving, and some one's given it an
enormous beefsteak. Now it's highly dangerous to give a beefsteak to a
starving person. The consequences might be fatal. That's why it's so
serious. That's why I must have time to think."
The sound of Sissie playing a waltz on the piano came up from the
drawing-room. Mr. Prohack started to dance all by himself in the middle
of the bedroom floor.
CHAPTER V
CHARLIE
I
When Mr. Prohack, in his mature but still rich velvet jacket, came down
to dinner, he found his son Charlie leaning against the mantelpiece in a
new dark brown suit, and studying _The Owner-Driver_. Charlie seemed
never to read anything but motor-car and light-car and side-car and
motor-bicycle periodical literature; but he read it conscientiously,
indefatigably, and completely--advertisements and all. He read it as
though it were an endless novel of passion and he an idle woman deprived
of the society her heart longed for. He possessed a motor-bicycle which
he stabled in a mews behind the Square. He had possessed several such
machines; he bought, altered, and sold them, apparently always with
profit to himself. He had no interest in non-mechanical literature or in
any of the arts.
"Your mother's gone to bed with a headache," said Mr. Prohack, with a
fair imitation of melancholy.
"Oh!" said the young man apathetically. His face had a wearied,
disillusioned expression.
"Is this the latest?" asked his father, indicating the new brown suit.
"My respectful congratulations. Very smart, especially at the waist."
For a youth who had nothing in the world but what remained of his wound
gratuity and other trifling military emoluments, and what he made out of
commerce in motor-bicycles, Charlie spent a lot in clothes. His mother
had advised his father to "speak to him about it." But his father had
declined to offer any criticism, on the ground that Charlie had fought
in Mesopotamia, Italy and France. Moreover, Charlie had scotched any
possible criticism by asserting that good clothes were all that stood
between him and the ruin of his career. "If I dressed like the dad," he
had once grimly and gloomily remarked, "it would be the beginning of the
end for me."
"Smart?" he now exclaimed, stepping forward. "Look at that." He advanced
his right leg a little. "Look at that crease. See where it falls?" The
trouser-crease, which, as all wise men know, ought to have fallen
exactly on the centre of the boot-lacing, fell about an inch to the left
thereof. "And I've tried this suit on four times! All the bally tailors
in London seem to think you've got nothing else to do but call and try
on and try on and try on. Never seems to occur to them that they don't
know their business. It's as bad as staff work. However, if this fellow
thinks I'm going to stick these trousers he'll have the surprise of his
life to-morrow morning." The youth spoke in a tone of earnest disgust.
"My boy," said Mr. Prohack, "you have my most serious sympathy. Your
life must be terribly complicated by this search for perfection."
"Yes, that's all very well," said Charlie.
"Where's Sissie?"
"Hanged if I know!"
"I heard her playing the piano not five minutes since."
"So did I."
Machin, the house-parlourmaid, then intervened:
"Miss Sissie had a telephone call, and she's gone out, sir."
"Where to?"
"She didn't say, sir. She only said she wouldn't be in for dinner, sir.
I made sure she'd told you herself, sir."
The two men, by means of their eyes, transmitted to each other a
unanimous judgment upon the whole female sex, and sat down to dine alone
in the stricken house. The dinner was extremely frugal, this being the
opening day of Mrs. Prohack's new era of intensive economy, but the
obvious pleasure of Machin in serving only men brightened up somewhat
its brief course. Charlie was taciturn and curt, though not impolite.
Mr. Prohack, whose private high spirits not even the amazing and
inexcusable absence of his daughter could impair, pretended to a decent
woe, and chatted as he might have done to a fellow-clubman on a wet
Sunday night at the Club.
At the end of the meal Charlie produced the enormous widow's cruse which
he called his cigarette-case and offered his father a cigarette.
"Doing anything to-night?" asked Mr. Prohack, puffing.
"No," answered desperately Charlie, puffing.
"Ring the bell, will you?"
While Charlie went to the mantelpiece Mr. Prohack secreted an apple for
his starving wife.
"Machin," said he to the incoming house-parlourmaid, "see if you can
find some port."
Charlie raised his fatigued eyebrows.
"Yes, sir," said the house-parlourmaid, vivaciously, and whisked away
her skirts, which seemed to remark:
"You're quite right to have port. I feel very sorry for you two
attractive gentlemen taking a poor dinner all alone."
Charlie drank his port in silence and Mr. Prohack watched him.
* * * * *
II
Mr. Prohack's son was, in some respects, a great mystery to him. He
could not understand, for instance, how his own offspring could be so
unresponsive to the attractions of the things of the mind, and so
interested in mere machinery and the methods of moving a living or a
lifeless object from one spot on the earth's surface to another. Mr.
Prohack admitted the necessity of machinery, but an automobile had for
him the same status as a child's scooter and no higher. It was an
ingenious device for locomotion. And there for him the matter ended. On
the other hand, Mr. Prohack sympathised with and comprehended his son's
general attitude towards life. Charlie had gone to war from Cambridge at
the age of nineteen. He went a boy, and returned a grave man. He went
thoughtless and light-hearted, and returned full of magnificent and
austere ideals. Six months of England had destroyed these ideals in him.
He had expected to help in the common task of making heaven in about a
fortnight. In the war he had learnt much about the possibilities of
human nature, but scarcely anything about its limitations. His father
tried to warn him, but of course failed. Charlie grew resentful, then
cynical. He saw in England nothing but futility, injustice and
ingratitude. He refused to resume Cambridge, and was bitterly sarcastic
about the generosity of a nation which, through its War Office, was
ready to pay to studious warriors anxious to make up University terms
lost in a holy war decidedly less than it paid to its street-sweepers.
Having escaped from death, the aforesaid warriors were granted the right
to starve their bodies while improving their minds. He might have had
sure situations in vast corporations. He declined them. He spat on them.
He called them "graves." What he wanted was an opportunity to fulfil
himself. He could not get it, and his father could not get it form him.
While searching for it, he frequently met warriors covered with ribbons
but lacking food and shelter not only for themselves but for their women
and children. All this, human nature being what it is, was inevitable,
but his father could not convincingly tell him so. All that Mr. Prohack
could effectively do Mr. Prohack did,--namely, provide the saviour of
Britain with food and shelter. Charlie was restlessly and dangerously
waiting for his opportunity. But he had not developed into a
revolutionist, nor a communist, nor anything of the sort. Oh, no! Quite
the reverse. He meditated a different revenge on society.
Mr. Prohack knew nothing of this meditated revenge, did not suspect it.
If he had suspected it, he might have felt less compassion than, on this
masculine evening with the unusual port, he did in fact feel. For he was
very sorry for Charlie. He longed to tell him about the fortune, and to
exult with him in the fortune, and to pour, as it were, the fortune into
his lap. He did not care a fig, now, about advisable precautions. He did
not feel the slightest constraint at the prospect of imparting the
tremendous and gorgeous news to his son. He had no desire to reflect
upon the proper method of telling. He merely and acutely wanted to tell,
so that he might see the relief and the joyous anticipation on his son's
enigmatic and melancholy face. But he could not tell because it had been
tacitly agreed with his wife that he should not tell in her absence.
True, he had given no verbal promise, but he had given something just as
binding.
"Nothing exciting to-day, I suppose," he said, when the silence had
begun to distress him in his secret glee.
"No," Charlie replied. "I got particulars of an affair at Glasgow, but
it needs money."
"What sort of an affair?"
"Oh! Rather difficult to explain. Buying and selling. Usual thing."
"What money is needed?"
"I should say three hundred or thereabouts. Might as well be three
thousand so far as I'm concerned."
"Where did you hear of it?"
"Club."
Charlie belonged to a little club in Savile Place where young warriors
told each other what they thought of the nature of society.
Mr. Prohack drew in his breath with an involuntary gasp, and then said:
"I expect I could let you have three hundred."
"_You couldn't!_"
"I expect I could." Mr. Prohack had never felt so akin to a god. It
seemed to him that he was engaged in the act of creating a future, yea,
a man. Charlie's face changed. He had been dead. He was now suddenly
alive.
"When?"
"Well, any time."
"Now?"
"Why not?"
Charlie looked at his watch.
"Well, I'm much obliged," he said.
* * * * *
III
Mr. Prohack had brought a new cheque-book from the Bank. It lay in his
hip-pocket. He had no alternative but to write out a cheque. Three
hundred pounds would nearly exhaust his balance, but that did not
matter. He gave Charlie the cheque. Charlie offered no further
information concerning the "affair" for which the money was required.
And Mr. Prohack did not choose to enquire. Perhaps he was too proud to
enquire. The money would probably be lost. And if it were lost no harm
would be done. Good, rather, for Charlie would have gained experience.
The lad was only a child, after all.
The lad ran upstairs, and Mr. Prohack sat solitary in delightful
meditation. After a few minutes the lad re-appeared in hat and coat. Mr.
Prohack thought that he had heard a bag dumped in the hall.
"Where are you off to?" he asked.
"Glasgow. I shall catch the night-train."
He rang the bell.
"Machin, run out and get me a taxi, sharp."
"Yes, sir." Machin flew. This was the same girl of whom Mrs. Prohack
dared to demand nothing. Mr. Prohack himself would have hesitated to
send her for a taxi. But Charlie ordered her about like a slave and she
seemed to like it.
"Rather sudden this, isn't it?" said Mr. Prohack, extremely startled by
the turn of events.
"Well, you've got to be sudden in this world, guv'nor," Charlie replied,
and lit a fresh cigarette.
Mr. Prohack was again too proud to put questions. Still, he did venture
upon one question:
"Have you got loose money for your fare?"
The lad laughed. "Oh, don't let that worry you, guv'nor...!" He looked
at his watch once more. "I wonder whether that infernal girl is
manufacturing that taxi or only fetching it."
"What must I say to your mother?" demanded Mr. Prohack.
"Give her my respectful regards."
The taxi was heard. Machin dashed into the house, and dashed out again
with the bag. The lad clasped his father's hand with a warm vigour that
pleased and reassured Mr. Prohack in his natural bewilderment. It was
not consistent with the paternal dignity to leave the dining-room and
stand, valedictory, on the front-doorstep.
"Well, I'm dashed!" Mr. Prohack murmured to himself as the taxi drove
away. And he had every right to be dashed.
CHAPTER VI
SISSIE
I
"Had any dinner?" Mr. Prohack asked his daughter.
"No."
"Aren't you hungry?"
"No, thanks."
Sissie seized the last remaining apple from the dessert-dish, and bit
into it with her beautiful and efficient teeth. She was slim, and rather
taller than necessary or than she desired to be. A pretty girl, dressed
in a short-skirted, short-sleeved, dark blue, pink-heightened frock that
seemed to combine usefulness with a decent perverse frivolity, and to
carry forward the expression of her face. She had bright brown hair. She
was perfectly mistress of the apple.
"Where's mother?"
"In bed with a headache."
"Didn't she have dinner with you?"
"She did not. And she doesn't want to be disturbed."
"Oh! I shan't disturb her, poor thing. I told her this afternoon she
would have one of her headaches."
"Well," said Mr. Prohack, "that's one of the most remarkable instances
of sound prophecy that I ever came across."
"Father, what's amusing you?"
"Nothing."
"Yes, something is. You've got your funny smile, and you were smiling
all to yourself when I came in."
"I was thinking. My right to think is almost the only right I possess
that hasn't yet been challenged in this house."
"Where's Charles?"
"Gone to Glasgow."
"Gone to _Glasgow_?"
"Yes."
"What, just now?"
"Ten minutes ago."
"Whatever has he gone to _Glasgow_ for?"
"I don't know,--any more than I know why you went out before dinner and
came back after dinner."
"Would you like to know why I went out?" Sissie spoke with sudden
ingratiatingness.
"No, not at all. But I should like to know why you went out without
telling anybody. When people are expected to dinner and fail to appear
they usually give notice of the failure."
"But, father, I told Machin."
"I said 'anybody.' Don't you know that the whole theory of the society
which you adorn is based on the assumption that Machin is nobody?"
"I was called away in a frightful hurry, and you and mother were
gossiping upstairs, and it's as much as one's life is worth to disturb
you two when you are together."
"Oh! That's news."
"Besides, I should have had to argue with mother, and you know what she
is."
"You flatter me. I don't even know what _you_ are, and you're elementary
compared to your mother."
"Anyhow, I'm glad mother's in bed with a headache. I came in here
trembling just now. Mother would have made such a tremendous fuss
although she's perfectly aware that it's not the slightest use making a
fuss.... Only makes me stupid and obstinate. Showers and showers of
questions there'd have been, whereas you haven't asked a single one."
"Yes, you're rather upset by my lack of curiosity. But let me just point
out that it is not consistent with my paternal duty to sit here and
listen to you slanging your mother. As a daughter you have vast
privileges, but you mustn't presume on them. There are some things I
couldn't stand from any woman without protest."
"But you must admit that mother _is_ a bit awful when she breaks loose."
"No. I've never known your mother awful, or even a bit awful."
"You aren't being intellectually honest, dad."
"I am."
"Ah! Well, of course she only shows her best side to _you_."
"She has no other side. In that sense she is certainly one-sided. Here!
Have another." Mr. Prohack took the apple from his pocket, and threw it
across the table to Sissie, who caught it.
II
Mr. Prohack was extremely happy; and Sissie too, in so far as concerned
the chat with her father, was extremely happy. They adored each other,
and they adored the awful woman laid low with a headache. Sissie's hat
and cloak, which she had dropped carelessly on a chair, slipped to the
floor, the hat carried away by the cloak. Mr. Prohack rose and picked
them up, took them out of the room, and returned.
"So now you've straightened up, and you're pleased with yourself,"
observed Sissie.
"So now," said he. "Perhaps I may turn on my curiosity tap."
"Don't," said Sissie. "I'm very gloomy. I'm very disappointed. I might
burst into tears at any moment.... Yes, I'm not joking."
"Out with it."
"Oh, it's nothing! It's only that I saw a chance of making some money
and it hasn't come off."
"But what do you want to make money for?"
"I like that. Hasn't mother been telling me off and on all day that
something will have to be done?"
"Done about what?"
"About economy, naturally." Sissie spoke rather sharply.
"But you don't mean your mother has spent the day in urging you to go
forth and earn money!"
"Of course she hasn't, father. How absurd you are! You know very well
mother would hate the idea of me earning money. Hate it! But I mean to
earn some. Surely it's much better to bring more money in than to pinch
and scrape. I loathe pinching and scraping."
"It's a sound loathing."
"And I thought I'd got hold of a scheme. But it's too big. I have fifty
pounds odd of my own, but what use is fifty pounds when a hundred's
needed? It's all off and I'm in the last stage of depression."
She threw away the core of the second apple.
"Is that port? I'll have some."
"So that you're short of fifty pounds?" said Mr. Prohack, obediently
pouring out the port--but only half a glass. "Well, I might be able to
let you have fifty pounds myself, if you would deign to accept it."
Sissie cried compassionately: "But you haven't got a cent, dad!"
"Oh! Haven't I? Did your mother tell you that?"
"Well, she didn't exactly say so."
"I should hope not! And allow me to inform you, my girl, that in
accusing me of not having a cent you're being guilty of the worst
possible taste. Children should always assume that their fathers have
mysterious stores of money, and that nothing is beyond their resources,
and if they don't rise to every demand it's only because in their
inscrutable wisdom they deem it better not to. Or it may be from mere
cussedness."
"Yes," said Sissie. "That's what I used to think when I was young. But
I've looked up your salary in _Whitaker's Almanac_."
"It was very improper of you. However, nothing is secret in these days,
and so I don't mind telling you that I've backed a winner to-day--not
to-day, but some little time since--and I can if necessary and agreeable
let you have fifty pounds."
Mr. Prohack as it were shook his crest in plenary contentment. He had
the same sensation of creativeness as he had had a while earlier with
his son,--a godlike sensation. And he was delighted with his girl. She
was so young and so old. And her efforts to play the woman of the world
with him were so comic and so touching. Only two or three years since
she had been driving a motor-van in order to defeat the Germans. She had
received twenty-eight shillings a week for six days of from twelve to
fourteen hours. She would leave the house at eight and come back at
eight, nine, or ten. And on her return, pale enough, she would laugh and
say she had had her dinner and would go to bed. But she had not had her
dinner. She was simply too tired and nervously exasperated to eat. And
she would lie in bed and tremble and cry quietly from fatigue. She did
not know that her parents knew these details. The cook, her confidante,
had told them, much later. And Mr. Prohack had decreed that Sissie must
never know that they knew. She had stuck to the task during a whole
winter, skidding on glassy asphalt, slimy wood, and slithery stone-setts
in the East End, and had met with but one accident, a minor affair. The
experience seemed to have had no permanent effect on her, but it had had
a permanent effect on her father's attitude towards her,--her mother had
always strongly objected to what she called the "episode," had shown
only relief when it concluded, and had awarded no merit for it.
"Can you definitely promise me fifty pounds, dad?" Sissie asked quietly.
Mr. Prohack made no articulate answer. His reply was to take out his
cheque-book and his fountain-pen and fill in a cheque to _Miss Sissie
Prohack or order_. He saw no just reason for differentiating between
the sexes in his offspring. He had given a cheque to Charlie; he gave
one to Sissie.
"Then you aren't absolutely stone-broke," said Sissie, smiling.
"I should not so describe myself."
"It's just like mother," she murmured, the smile fading.
Mr. Prohack raised a sternly deprecating hand. "Enough."
"But don't you want to know what I want the money for?" Sissie demanded.
"No!... Ha-ha!"
"Then I shall tell you. The fact is I must tell you."
* * * * *
III
"I've decided to teach dancing," said Sissie, beginning again nervously,
as her father kept a notable silence.
"I thought you weren't so very keen on dancing."
"I'm not; but perhaps that's because I don't care much for the new
fashion of dancing a whole evening with the same man. Still the point is
that I'm a very fine dancer. Even Charlie will tell you that."
"But I thought that all the principal streets in London were full of
dancing academies at the present time, chiefly for the instruction of
aged gentlemen."
"I don't know anything about that," Sissie replied seriously. "What I do
know is that now I can find a hundred pounds, I have a ripping chance of
taking over a studio--at least part of one; and it's got quite a big
connection already,--in fact pupils are being turned away."
"And this is all you can think of!" protested Mr. Prohack with
melancholy. "We are living on the edge of a volcano--the country is, I
mean--and your share in the country's work is to teach the citizens to
dance!"
"Well," said Sissie. "They'll dance anyhow, and so they may as well
learn to dance properly. And what else can I do? Have you had me taught
to do anything else? You and mother have brought me up to be perfectly
useless except as the wife of a rich man. That's what you've done, and
you can't deny it."
"Once," said Mr. Prohack. "You very nobly drove a van."
"Yes, I did. But no thanks to you and mother. Why, I had even to learn
to drive in secret, lest you should stop me! And I can tell you one
thing--if I was to start driving a van now I should probably get mobbed
in the streets. All the men have a horrid grudge against us girls who
did their work in the war. If we want to get a job in these days we
jolly well have to conceal the fact that we were in the W.A.A.C. or in
anything at all during the war. They won't look at us if they find out
that. Our reward! However, I don't want to drive a van. I want to teach
dancing. It's not so dirty and it pays better. And if people feel like
dancing, why shouldn't they dance? Come now, dad, be reasonable."
"That's asking a lot from any human being, and especially from a
parent."
"Well, have you got any argument against what I say?"
"I prefer not to argue."
"That's because you can't."
"It is. It is. But what is this wonderful chance you've got?"
"It's that studio where Charlie and I went last night, at Putney."
"At _Putney_?"
"Well, why not Putney? They have a gala night every other week, you
know. It belongs to Viola Ridle. Viola's going to get married and live
in Edinburgh, and she's selling it. And Eliza asked me if I'd join her
in taking it over. Eliza telephoned me about it to-night, and so I
rushed across the Park to see her. But Viola's asking a hundred pounds
premium and a hundred for the fittings, and very cheap it is too. In
fact Viola's a fool, _I_ think, but then she's fond of Eliza."
"Now, Eliza? Is that Eliza Brating, or am I getting mixed up?"
"Yes, it's Eliza Brating."
"Ah!"
"You needn't be so stuffy, dad, because her father's only a
second-division clerk at the Treasury."
"Oh, I'm not. It was only this morning that I was saying to Mr. Hunter
that we must always remember that second-division clerks are also God's
creatures."
"Father, you're disgusting."
"Don't say that, my child. At my age one needs encouragement, not abuse.
And I'm glad to be able to tell you that there is no longer any
necessity either for you to earn money or to pinch and scrape.
Satisfactory arrangements have been made...."
"Really? Well, that's splendid. But of course it won't make any
difference to me. There may be no necessity so far as you're concerned.
But there's my inward necessity. I've got to be independent. It wouldn't
make any difference if you had an income of ten thousand a year."
Mr. Prohack blenched guiltily.
"Er--er--what was I going to say? Oh, yes,--where's this Eliza of yours
got her hundred pounds from?"
"I don't know. It's no business of mine."
"But do you insist--shall you--insist on introductions from your
pupils?"
"Father, how you do chop about! No, naturally we shan't insist on
introductions."
"Then any man can come for lessons?"
"Certainly. Provided he wears evening-dress on gala nights, and pays the
fees and behaves properly. Viola says some of them prefer afternoon
lessons because they haven't got any evening-dress."
"If I were you I shouldn't rush at it," said Mr. Prohack.
"But we must rush at it--or lose it. And I've no intention of losing it.
Viola has to make her arrangements at once."
"I wonder what your mother will say when you ask her."
"I shan't ask her. I shall tell her. Nobody can decide this thing for
me. I have to decide it for myself, and I've decided it. As for what
mother says--" Sissie frowned and then smiled, "that's your affair."
"My affair!" Mr. Prohack exclaimed in real alarm. "What on earth do you
mean?"
"Well, you and she are so thick together. You're got to live with her. I
haven't got to live with her."
"I ask you, what on earth _do_ you mean?"
"But surely you've understood, father, that I shall have to live at the
studio. Somebody has to be on the spot, and there are two bedrooms. But
of course you'll be able to put all that right with mother, dad. You'll
do it for your own sake; but a bit for mine, too." She giggled
nervously, ran round the table and kissed her parent. "I'm frightfully
obliged for the fifty pounds," she said. "You and the mater will be
fearfully happy together soon if Charlie doesn't come back. Ta-ta! I
must be off now."
"Where?"
"To Eliza's of course. We shall probably go straight down to Putney
together and see Viola and fix everything up. I know Viola's had at
least one other good offer. I may sleep at the studio. If not, at
Eliza's. Anyhow it will be too late for me to come back here."
"I absolutely forbid you to go off like this."
"Yes, do, father. You forbid for all you're worth if it gives you any
pleasure. But it won't be much use unless you can carry me upstairs and
lock me in my room. Oh! Father, you are a great pretender. You know
perfectly well you're delighted with me."
"Indeed I'm not! I suppose you'll have the decency to see your mother
before you go?"
"What! And wake her! You said she wasn't to be disturbed 'on any
account.'"
"I deny that I said 'on any account.'"
"I shouldn't dream of disturbing her. And you'll tell her so much better
than I could. You can do what you like with her."
IV
"Where's my dessert?" demanded Mrs. Prohack, anxiously and resentfully,
when her husband at length reached the bedroom. "I'm dying of hunger,
and I've got a real headache now. Oh! Arthur how absurd all this is! At
least it would be if I wasn't so hungry."
"Sissie ate all the dessert," Mr. Prohack answered timidly. He no longer
felt triumphant, careless and free. Indeed for some minutes he had
practically forgotten that he had inherited ten thousand a year. "The
child ate it every bit, so I couldn't bring any. Shall I ring for
something else?"
"And why," Mrs. Prohack continued, "why have you been so long? And
what's all this business of taxis rushing up to the door all the
evening?"
"Marian," said Mr. Prohack, ignoring her gross exaggeration of the truth
as to the taxis. "I'd better tell you at once. Charlie's gone to Glasgow
on his own business and Sissie's just run down to Viola Ridle's studio
about a new scheme of some kind that she's thinking of. For the moment
we're alone in the world."
"It's always the same," she remarked with indignation, when with forced
facetiousness he had given her an extremely imperfect and bowdlerized
account of his evening. "It's always the same. As soon as I'm laid up in
bed, everything goes wrong. My poor boy, I cannot imagine what you've
been doing. I suppose I'm very silly, but I _can't_ understand it."
Nor could Mr. Prohack himself, now that he was in the sane conjugal
atmosphere of the bedroom.
CHAPTER VII
THE SYMPATHETIC QUACK
I
The next morning Mr. Prohack had a unique shock, for he was awakened by
his wife coming into the bedroom. She held a big piece of cake in her
hand. Never before had Mrs. Prohack been known to rise earlier than her
husband. Also, the hour was eight-twenty, whereas never before had Mr.
Prohack been known, on a working-day, to rise later than eight o'clock.
He realised with horror that it would be necessary for him to hurry.
Still, he did not jump up. He was not a brilliant sleeper, and he had
had a bad night, which had only begun to be good at the time when as a
rule he woke finally for the day. He did not feel very well, despite the
fine sensation of riches which rushed reassuringly into his arms the
moment consciousness returned.
"Arthur," said Mrs. Prohack, who was in her Chinese robe, "do you know
that girl hasn't been home all night. Her bed hasn't been slept in!"
"Neither has mine," answered Mr. Prohack. "What girl?"
"Sissie, of course."
"Ah! Sissie!" murmured Mr. Prohack as if he had temporarily forgotten
that such a girl existed. "Didn't I tell you last night she mightn't be
back?"
"No, you didn't! And you know very well you didn't!"
"Honestly," said Mr. Prohack (meaning "dishonestly" as most people do in
similar circumstances), "I thought I did."
"Do you suppose I should have slept one wink if I'd thought Sissie
wasn't coming _home_?"
"Yes, I do. The death of Nelson wouldn't keep you awake. And now either
I shall be late at the office, or else I shall go without my breakfast.
I think you might have wakened me."
Mrs. Prohack, munching the cake despite all her anxieties, replied in a
peculiar tone:
"What does it matter if you are late for the office?"
Mr. Prohack reflected that all women were alike in a lack of conscience
where the public welfare was concerned. He was rich: therefore he was
entitled to neglect his duty to the nation! A pleasing argument! Mr.
Prohack sat up, and Mrs. Prohack had a full view of his face for the
first time that morning.
"Arthur," she exclaimed, absolutely and in an instant forgetting both
cake and daughter. "You're ill!"
He thought how agreeable it was to have a wife who was so marvellously
absorbed in his being. There was something uncanny, something terrible,
in it.
"Oh, no I'm not," he said. "I swear I'm not. I'm very tired, but I'm not
ill. Get out of my way."
"But your face is as yellow as a cheese," protested Eve, frightened.
"It may be," said Mr. Prohack.
"You won't get up."
"I shall get up."
Eve snatched her hand-mirror from the dressing-table, and gave it to him
with a menacing gesture. He admitted to himself that the appearance of
his face was perhaps rather alarming at first sight; but really he did
not feel ill; he only felt tired.
"It's nothing. Liver." He made a move to emerge from the bed. "Exercise
is all I want."
He saw Eve's lips tremble; he saw tears hanging in her eyes; these
phenomena induced in him the sensation of having somehow committed a
solecism or a murder. He withdrew the move to emerge. She was hurt and
desperate. He at once knew himself defeated. He thought how annoying it
was to have a woman in the house who was so marvellously absorbed in his
being. She was wrong; but her unreasoning desperation triumphed over his
calm sagacity.
"Telephone for Dr. Veiga," said Mrs. Prohack to Machin, for whom she had
rung. "V-e-i-g-a. Bruton Street. He's in the book. And ask him to come
along as soon as he can to see Mr. Prohack."
Now Mr. Prohack had heard of, but never seen, Dr. Veiga. He had more
than once listened to the Portuguese name on Eve's lips, and the man had
been mentioned more than once at the club. Mr. Prohack knew that he was,
if not a foreigner, of foreign descent, and hence he did not like him.
Mr. Prohack took kindly to foreign singers and cooks, but not to foreign
doctors. Moreover he had doubts about the fellow's professional
qualifications. Therefore he strongly resented his wife's most singular
and startling order to Machin, and as soon as Machin had gone he
expressed himself:
"Anyway," he said curtly, after several exchanges, "I shall see my own
doctor, if I see any doctor at all--which is doubtful."
Eve's response was to kiss her husband--a sisterly rather than a wifely
kiss. And she said, in a sweet, noble voice:
"It's I that want Dr. Veiga's opinion about you, and I must insist on
having it. And what's more, you know I've never cared for your friend
Dr. Plott. He never seems to be interested. He scarcely listens to what
you have to say. He scarcely examines you. He just makes you think your
health is of no importance at all, and it doesn't really matter whether
you're ill or well, and that you may get better or you mayn't, and that
he'll humour you by sending you a bottle of something."
"Stuff!" said Mr. Prohack. "He's a first-rate fellow. No infernal
nonsense about _him!_ And what do _you_ know about Veiga? I should like
to be informed."
"I met him at Mrs. Cunliff's. He cured her of cancer."
"You told me Mrs. Cunliff hadn't got cancer at all."
"Well, it was Dr. Veiga who found out she hadn't, and stopped the
operation just in time. She says he saved her life, and she's quite
right. He's wonderful."
Mrs. Prohack was now sitting on the bed. She gazed at her husband's
features with acute apprehension and yet with persuasive grace.
"Oh! Arthur!" she murmured, "you are a worry to me!"
Mr. Prohack, not being an ordinary Englishman, knew himself beaten--for
the second time that morning. He dared not trifle with his wife in her
earnest, lofty mood.
"I bet you Veiga won't come," said Mr. Prohack.
"He will come," said Mrs. Prohack blandly.
"How do you know?"
"Because he told me he'd come at once if ever I asked him. He's a
perfect dear."
"Oh! I know the sort!" Mr. Prohack said sarcastically. "And you'll see
the fee he'll charge!"
"When it's a question of health money doesn't matter."
"It doesn't matter when you've got the money. You'd never have dreamed
of having Veiga this time yesterday. You wouldn't even have sent for old
Plott."
Mrs. Prohack merely kissed her husband again, with a kind of ineffable
resignation. Then Machin came in with her breakfast, and said that Dr.
Veiga would be round shortly, and was told to telephone to the Treasury
that her master was ill in bed.
"And what about my breakfast?" the victim enquired with irony. "Give me
some of your egg."
"No, dearest, egg is the very last thing you should have with that
colour."
"Well, if you'd like to know, I don't want any breakfast. Couldn't eat
any."
"There you are!" Mrs. Prohack exclaimed triumphantly. "And yet you swear
you aren't ill! That just shows.... It will be quite the best thing for
you not to take anything until Dr. Veiga's been."
Mr. Prohack, helpless, examined the ceiling, and decided to go to the
office in the afternoon. He tried to be unhappy but couldn't. Eye was
too funny, too delicious, too exquisitely and ingenuously "firm," too
blissful in having him at her mercy, for him to be unhappy.... To say
nothing of the hundred thousand pounds! And he knew that Eve also was
secretly revelling in the hundred thousand pounds. Dr. Veiga was her
first bite at it.
* * * * *
II
Considering that he was well on the way to being a fashionable
physician, Dr. Veiga arrived with surprising promptitude. Mr. Prohack
wondered what hold Eve had upon him and how she had acquired it. He was
prejudiced against the fellow before he came into the bedroom, simply
because Eve, on hearing the noise of a car and a doorbell, had hurried
downstairs, and a considerable interval had elapsed between the doctor's
entrance into the house and his appearance at the bedside. Mr. Prohack
guessed easily that those two had been plotting against him. Strange how
Eve could be passionately loyal and basely deceitful simultaneously! The
two-faced creature led the doctor forward with a candid smile that
partook equally of the smile of a guardian angel and the smile of a
cherub. She was an unparalleled comedian.
Dr. Veiga was fattish and rather shabby; about sixty years of age. He
spoke perfectly correct English with a marked foreign accent. His
demeanour was bland, slightly familiar, philosophical and sympathetic.
Dr. Plott's eyes would have said: "This is my thirteenth visit this
morning, and I've eighteen more to do, and it's all very tedious. Why
_do_ you people let yourselves get ill--if it's a fact that you really
are ill? I don't think you are, but I'll see." Dr. Veiga's eyes said:
"How interesting your case is! You've had no luck this time. We must
make the best of things; but also we must face the truth. God knows I
don't want to boast, but I expect I can put you right, with the help of
your own strong commonsense."
Mr. Prohack, a connoisseur in human nature, noted the significances of
the Veiga glance, but he suspected that there might also be something
histrionic in it. Dr. Veiga examined heart, pulse, tongue. He tapped the
torso. He asked many questions. Then he took an instrument out of a
leather case which he carried, and fastened a strap round Mr. Prohack's
forearm and attached it to the instrument, and presently Mr. Prohack
could feel the strong pulsations of the blood current in his arm.
"Dear, dear!" said Dr. Veiga. "175. Blood pressure too high. Much too
high! Must get that down."
Eve looked as though the end of the world had been announced, and even
Mr. Prohack had qualms. Ten minutes earlier Mr. Prohack had been a
strong, healthy man a trifle unwell in a bedroom. He was suddenly
transformed into a patient in a nursing-home.
"A little catarrh," said Dr. Veiga.
"I've got no catarrh," said Mr. Prohack, with conviction.
"Yes, yes. Catarrh of the stomach. Probably had it for years. The
duodenum is obstructed. A little accident that easily happens."
He addressed himself as it were privately to Mrs. Prohack. "The duodenum
is no thicker than that." He indicated the pencil with which he was
already writing in a pocket-book. "We'll get it right."
"What is the duodenum?" Mr. Prohack wanted to cry out. But he was too
ashamed to ask. It was hardly conceivable that he, so wise, so prudent,
had allowed over forty years to pass in total ignorance of this
important item of his own body. He felt himself to be a bag full of
disconcerting and dangerous mysteries. Or he might have expressed it
that he had been smoking in criminal nonchalance for nearly half a
century on the top of a powder magazine. He was deeply impressed by the
rapidity and assurance of the doctor's diagnosis. It was wonderful that
the queer fellow could in a few minutes single out an obscure organ no
bigger than a pencil and say: "There is the ill." The fellow might be a
quack, but sometimes quacks were men of genius. His shame and his alarm
quickly vanished under the doctor's reassuring and bland manner. So much
so that when Dr. Veiga had written out a prescription, Mr. Prohack said
lightly:
"I suppose I can get up, though."
To which Dr. Veiga amiably replied:
"I shall leave that to you. Perhaps if I tell you you'll be lucky if
you don't have jaundice...! But I think you _will_ be lucky. I'll try to
look in again this afternoon."
These last words staggered both Mr. and Mrs. Prohack.
"I've been expecting this for years. I knew it would come." Mrs. Prohack
breathed tragically.
And even Mr. Prohack reflected aghast:
"My God! Doctor calling twice a day!"
True, "duodenum" was a terrible word.
Mrs. Prohack gazed at Dr. Veiga as at a high priest, and waited to be
vouchsafed a further message.
"Anyhow, if I find it impossible to call, I'll telephone in any case,"
said Dr. Veiga.
Some slight solace in this!
Mrs. Prohack, like an acolyte, personally attended the high priest as
far as the street, listening with acute attention to his
recommendations. When she returned she had put on a carefully bright
face. Evidently she had decided, or had been told, that cheerfulness was
essential to ward off jaundice.
"Now that's what I _call_ a doctor," said she. "To think of your friend
Plott...! I've telephoned for a messenger boy to go to the chemist's."
"You're at liberty to call the man a doctor," answered Mr. Prohack. "And
I'm at liberty to call him a fine character actor."
"I knew the moment you sat up it was jaundice," said Mrs. Prohack.
"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "I lay you five to one I don't have jaundice.
Not that you'd ever pay me if you lost."
Mrs. Prohack said:
"When I saw you were asleep at after eight o'clock this morning I knew
there must be something serious. I felt it. However, as the doctor says,
if we _take_ it seriously it will soon cease to be serious."
"He's not a bad phrase-maker," said Mr. Prohack.
In the late afternoon Dr. Veiga returned like an old and familiar
acquaintance, with his confident air of saying: "We can manage this
affair between us--I am almost sure." Mr. Prohack felt worse; and the
room, lighted by one shaded lamp, had begun to look rather like a real
sick-room. Mr. Prohack, though he mistrusted the foreign accent, the
unprofessional appearance, and the adventurous manner, was positively
glad to see his new doctor, and indeed felt that he had need of succour.
"Yes," said Dr. Veiga, after investigation. "My opinion is that you'll
escape jaundice. In four or five days you ought to be as well as you
were before the attack. I don't say _how_ well you were before."
Mr. Prohack instantly felt better.
"It will be very awkward if I can't get back to the office early next
week," said he.
"I'm sure it will," Dr. Veiga agreed. "And it might be still more
awkward if you went back to the office early next week, and then never
went any more."
"What do you mean?"
Dr. Veiga smiled understandingly at Mrs. Prohack, as though he and she
were the only grown-up persons in the room.
"Look here," he addressed the patient. "I see I shall have to charge you
a fee for telling you what you know as well as I do. The fact is I get
my living by doing that. How old are you?"
"Forty-six."
"Every year of the war counts double. So you're over fifty. A difficult
age. You can run an engine ten hours a day for fifty years. But it's
worn; it's second-hand. And if you keep on running it ten hours a day
you'll soon discover how worn it is. But you can run it five hours a day
for another twenty years with reasonable safety and efficiency. That's
what I wanted to tell you. You aren't the man you were, Mr. Prohack.
You've lost the trick of getting rid of your waste products. You say you
feel tired. Why do you feel tired? Being tired simply means being
clogged. The moment you feel tired your waste products are beginning to
pile up. Look at those finger joints! Waste products! Friction! Why
don't you sleep well? You say the more tired you are the worse you
sleep: and you seem surprised. But you're only surprised because you
haven't thought it out. Morpheus himself wouldn't sleep if his body was
a mass of friction-producing waste products from top to toe. You aren't
a body and soul, Mr. Prohack. You're an engine--I wish you'd remember
that and treat yourself like one. The moment you feel tired, stop the
engine. If you don't, it'll stop itself. It pretty nearly stopped
to-day. You need lubrication too. The best lubricant is a tumbler of hot
water four times a day. And don't take coffee, or any salt except what
your cook puts into the dishes. Don't try to be cleverer than nature.
Don't think the clock is standing still. It isn't. If you treat yourself
as well as you treat your watch, you'll bury me. If you don't, I shall
bury you. All that I've told you I know by heart, because I'm saying it
to men of your age every day of my life."
Mr. Prohack felt like a reprimanded schoolboy. He feared the wrath to
come.
"Don't you think my husband ought to take a long holiday?" Eve put in.
"Well, _of course_ he ought," said Dr. Veiga, opening both mouth and
eyes in protest against such a silly question.
"Six months?"
"At least."
"Where ought he to go?"
"Doesn't matter. Portugal, the Riviera, Switzerland. But it's not the
season yet for any of these places. If he wants to keep on pleasant
terms with nature he'll get out his car and motor about his own country
for a month or two. After that he might go to the Continent. But of
course he won't. I know these official gentlemen. If you ask them to
disturb their routine they'll die first. They really would sooner die.
Very natural of course. Routine is their drug."
"My husband will take six months holiday," said Eve quietly. "I suppose
you could give the proper certificate? You see in these Government
departments...."
"I'll give you the certificate to-morrow."
Mr. Prohack was pretending to be asleep, or at least to be too fatigued
and indifferent to take notice of this remarkable conversation. But as
soon as Dr. Veiga had blandly departed under the escort of Eve, he
slipped out of bed and cautiously padded to the landing where there was
a bookcase.
"Duodenum. Duodenum. Must be something to do with twelve." Then he found
a dictionary and brought it back into the bedroom and consulted it. "So
it's twelve inches long, is it?" he murmured. He had just time to plunge
into bed and pitch the dictionary under the bed before his wife
returned.
* * * * *
III
She was bending over him.
"Darling!"
He opened his deceiving eyes. Her face was within a foot of his.
"How do you feel now?"
"I feel," said he, "that this is the darnedest swindle that ever was.
If I hadn't come into a fortune I should have been back at the office
the day after to-morrow. In about eight hours, with the help of that
Portuguese mountebank, you've changed me from a sane normal man into a
blooming valetudinarian who must run all over the earth in search of
health. I've got to 'winter' somewhere, have I? You'll see. It's
absolutely incredible. It's more like Maskelyne and Cook's than anything
I ever came across." He yawned. He knew that it was the disturbed
duodenum that caused him to yawn, and that also gave him a dry mouth and
a peculiar taste therein.
"Yes, darling," Eve smiled above him the smile of her impenetrable
angelicism. "Yes, darling. You're better."
The worst was that she had beaten him on the primary point. He had
asserted that he was not ill. She had asserted that he was. She had been
right; he wrong. He could not deny, even to himself, that he was ill.
Not gravely, only somewhat. But supposing that he was gravely ill!
Supposing that old Plott would agree with all that Veiga had said! It
was conceivable. Misgivings shot through him.
And Eve had him at her sweet mercy. He was helpless. She was easily the
stronger. He perceived then, what many a husband dies without having
perceived, that his wife had a genuine individual existence and volition
of her own, that she was more than his complement, his companion, the
mother of his children.
She lowered her head further and gave him a long, fresh, damp kiss. They
were very intimate, with an intimacy that her enigmatic quality could
not impair. He was annoyed, aggrieved, rebellious, but extremely happy
in a weak sort of way. He hated and loved her, he despised and adored
her, he reprehended and admired her--all at once. What specially
satisfied him was that he had her to himself. The always-impinging
children were not there. He liked this novel solitude of two.
"Darling, where is Charlie staying in Glasgow?"
"Why?"
"I want to write to him."
"Post's gone, my poor child."
"Then I shall telegraph."
"What about?"
"Never mind."
"I shan't tell you the address unless you promise to show me the
telegram. I intend to be master in my own house even if I am dying."
Thus he saw the telegram, which ran: "Father ill in bed what is the
best motor car to buy. Love. Mother." The telegram astounded Mr.
Prohack.
"Have you taken leave of your senses?" he cried. Then he laughed. What
else was there to do? What else but the philosopher's laugh was adequate
to the occasion?
While Eve with her own unrivalled hand was preparing the bedroom for the
night, Machin came in with a telegram. Without being asked to do so Eve
showed it to the sufferer: "Tell him to buck up. Eagle six cylinder.
Everything fine here. Charles."
"I think he might have sent his love," said Eve.
Mr. Prohack no longer attempted to fight against the situation, which
was like a net winding itself round him.
CHAPTER VIII
SISSIE'S BUSINESS
I
One evening, ten days later, Mr. Prohack slipped out of his own house as
stealthily as a thief might have slipped into it. He was cured
provisionally. The unseen, unfelt, sinister duodenum no longer
mysteriously deranged his whole engine. Only a continual sensation of
slight fatigue indicated all the time that he was not cleverer than
nature and that he was not victoriously disposing of his waste products.
But he could walk mildly about; his zest for smoking had in part
returned; and to any uninstructed observer he bore a close resemblance
to a healthy man.
Four matters worried him, of which three may be mentioned immediately.
He could not go to the Treasury. His colleague Hunter had amiably called
the day after his seizure, and Mrs. Prohack had got hold of Hunter. Her
influence over sane and well-balanced males was really extraordinary.
Mr. Prohack had remained in perfect ignorance of the machinations of
these two for eight days, at the end of which period he received by post
an official document informing him that My Lords of the Treasury had
granted him six months' leave of absence for reasons of ill-health. Dr.
Veiga had furnished the certificate unknown to the patient. The quick
despatch of the affair showed with what celerity a government department
can function when it is actuated from the inside. The leave of absence
for reasons of ill-health of course prevented Mr. Prohack from appearing
at his office. How could he with decency appear at his office seemingly
vigorous when it had been officially decided that he was too ill to
work? And Mr. Prohack desired greatly to visit the Treasury. The habit
of a life-time had been broken in a moment, and since Mr. Prohack was
the creature of that habit he suffered accordingly. He had been
suffering for two days. This was the first matter that worried Mr.
Prohack.
The second matter had to do with his clubs. He was cut off from his
clubs. Partly for the same reason as that which cut him off from the
Treasury--for both his clubs were full of Civil Servants--and partly
because he was still somehow sensitive concerning the fact of his
inheritance. He would have had a similar objection to entering his clubs
in Highland kilt. The explanation was obvious. He hated to be
conspicuous. His inheritance was already (through Mr. Softly Bishop) the
talk of certain official and club circles, and Mr. Prohack apprehended
that every eye would be curiously upon him if he should set foot in a
club. He could not bear that, and he could not bear the questions and
the pleasantries. One day he would have to bear them--but not yet.
The third matter that worried him was that he could not, even in secret,
consult his own doctor. How could he go to old Plott and say: "Plott,
old man, I've been ill and my wife insisted upon having another doctor,
but I've come to ask you to tell me whether or not the other doctor's
right?" The thing was impossible. Yet he badly wanted to verify Veiga by
Plott. He still mistrusted Veiga, though his mistrust lessened daily,
despite his wish to see it increase.
Mrs. Prohack had benevolently suggested that he should run down to his
club, but on no account for a meal--merely "for a change." He had
declined, without giving the reason, and she had admitted that perhaps
he was right.
He attributed all the worries to his wife.
"I pay a fine price for that woman," he thought as he left the house, "a
rare fine price!" But as for her price, he never haggled over it. She,
just as she existed in her awful imperfection, was his first necessary
of life. She had gone out after dinner to see an acquaintance about a
house-maid (for already she was reorganising the household on a more
specious scale); she was a mile off at least; but she would have
disapproved of him breaking loose into his clubs at night, and so the
Terror of the departments stole forth, instead of walking forth,
intimidated by that moral influence which she left behind her.
Undoubtedly since the revolt of the duodenum her grip of him had
sensibly tightened.
Not that Mr. Prohack was really going to a club. He had deceitfully told
himself that he _might_ stroll down to his principal club, for the sake
of exercise (his close friends among the members were lunchers not
diners), but the central self within himself was aware that no club
would see him that evening.
A taxi approached in the darkness; he knew by its pace that it was
empty. He told the driver to drive to Putney. In the old days of eleven
days ago he would not have dared to tell a taxi-driver to drive to
Putney, for the fare would have unbalanced his dizzy private weekly
budget; and even now he felt he was going the deuce of a pace. Even now
he would prudently not have taken a taxi had not part of the American
hundred thousand pounds already materialised. Mr. Softly Bishop had been
to see him on the previous day, and in addition to being mysteriously
sympathetic about his co-heir's ill-health had produced seven thousand
pounds of the hundred thousand. A New York representative had cabled
fourteen thousand, not because Mr. Prohack was in a hurry for seven, but
because Mr. Softly Bishop was in a hurry for seven. And Mr. Softly
Bishop had pointed out something which Mr. Prohack, Treasury official,
had not thought of. He had pointed out that Mr. Prohack might begin
immediately to spend just as freely as if the hundred thousand were
actually in hand.
"You see," said he, "the interest has been accumulating over there ever
since Angmering's death, and it will continue to accumulate until we get
all the capital; and the interest runs up to about a couple of hundred a
week for each of us."
Now Mr. Prohack had directed the taxi to his daughter's dance studio,
and perhaps it was the intention to do so that had made him steal
ignobly out of the house. For Eve would assuredly have rebelled. A state
of war existed between Eve and her daughter, and Mr. Prohack's
intelligence, as well as his heart, had ranged him on Eve's side. Since
Sissie's departure, the girl had given no sign whatever to her parents.
Mrs. Prohack had expected to see her on the next day after her
defection. But there was no Sissie, and there was no message from
Sissie. Mrs. Prohack bulged with astounding news for Sissie, of her
father's illness and inheritance. But Mrs. Prohack's resentful pride
would not make the first move, and would not allow Mr. Prohack to make
it. They knew, at second-hand through a friend of Viola Ridle's, that
Sissie was regularly active at the studio; also Sissie had had the
effrontery to send a messenger for some of her clothes--without even a
note! The situation was incredible, and waxed daily in incredibility.
Sissie's behaviour could not possibly be excused.
This was the fourth and the chief matter that worried Mr. Prohack. He
regarded it sardonically as rather a lark; but he was worried to think
of the girl making a fool of herself with her mother. Her mother was
demonstrably in the right. To yield to the chit's appalling
heartlessness would be bad tactics and it would be humiliating.
Nevertheless Mr. Prohack had directed the taxi-driver to the
dance-studio at Putney. On the way it suddenly occurred to him, almost
with a shock, that he was a rich man, secure from material anxieties,
and that therefore he ought to feel light-hearted. He had been losing
sight of this very important fact for quite some time.
* * * * *
II
The woman in the cubicle near the door was putting a fresh disc on to a
gramophone and winding up the instrument. She was a fat, youngish woman,
in a parlourmaid's cap and apron, and Mr. Prohack had a few days earlier
had a glimpse of her seated in his own hall waiting for a package of
Sissie's clothes.
"Very sorry, sir," said she, turning her head negligently from the
gramophone and eyeing him seriously. "I'm afraid you can't go in if
you're not in evening dress." Evidently from her firm, polite voice, she
knew just what she was about, did that young woman. She added: "The
rule's very strict on Fridays."
At the same moment a bell rang once. The woman immediately released the
catch of the gramophone and lowered the needle on to the disc, and Mr.
Prohack heard music, but not from the cubicle. There was a round hole in
the match-board partition, and the trumpet attachment of the gramophone
disappeared beyond the hole.
"This affair is organised," thought Mr. Prohack, decidedly impressed by
the ingenuity of the musical arrangement and by the promptness of the
orchestral director in obeying the signal of the bell.
"My name is Prohack," said he. "I'm Miss Prohack's father."
This important announcement ought to have startled the sangfroid of the
guardian, but it did not. She merely said, with a slight mechanical
smile:
"As soon as this dance is over, sir, I'll let Miss Prohack know she's
wanted." She did not say: "Sir, a person of your eminence is above
rules. Go right in."
Two girls in all-enveloping dark cloaks entered behind him.
"Good-evening, Lizzie," one of them greeted the guardian. And Lizzie's
face relaxed into a bright genuine smile.
"Good-evening, miss. Good-evening, miss."
The two girls vanished rustlingly through a door over which was hung a
piece of cardboard with the written words: "Ladies' cloakroom." In a few
moments they emerged, white and fluffy apparitions, eager,
self-conscious, and they vanished through another door. Mr. Prohack
judged from their bridling and from their whispers to each other that
they belonged to the class which ministers to the shopping-class. He
admitted that they looked very nice and attractive; but he had the
sensation of having blundered into a queer, hitherto unknown world, and
of astonishment and qualms that his daughter should be a ruler in that
world.
Lizzie stood up and peeped through a little square window in the
match-boarding. As soon as she had finished peeping Mr. Prohack took
liberty to peep also, and the dance-studio was revealed to him. Somehow
he could scarcely believe that it was not a hallucination, and that he
was really in Putney, and that his own sober house in which Sissie had
been reared still existed not many miles off.
For Mr. Prohack, not continuously but at intervals, possessed a
disturbing faculty that compelled him to see the phenomena of human life
as they actually were, and to disregard entirely the mere names of
things,--which mere names by the magic power of mere names usually
suffice to satisfy the curiosity of most people and to allay their
misgivings if any. Mr. Prohack now saw (when he looked downwards) a
revolving disc which was grating against a stationary needle and thereby
producing unpleasant rasping sounds. But it was also producing a quite
different order of sounds. He did not in the least understand, and he
did not suppose that anybody in the dance-studio understood, the
delicate secret mechanism by which these other sounds were produced. All
he knew was that by means of the trumpet attachment they were
transmitted through the wooden partition and let loose into the larger
air of the studio, where the waves of them had a singular effect on the
brains of certain bright young women and sombre young and middle-aged
men who were arranged in clasped couples: with the result that the
brains of the women and men sent orders to their legs, arms, eyes, and
they shifted to and fro in rhythmical movements. Each woman placed
herself very close--breast against breast--to each man, yielding her
volition absolutely to his, and (if the man was the taller) often gazing
up into his face with an ecstatic expression of pleasure and
acquiescence. The physical relations between the units of each couple
would have caused censorious comment had the couple been alone or
standing still; but the movement and the association of couples seemed
mysteriously to lift the whole operation above criticism and to endow it
with a perfect propriety. The motion of the couples, and their manner of
moving, over the earth's surface were extremely monotonous; some couples
indeed only walked stiffly to and fro; on the other hand a few exhibited
variety, lightness and grace, in manoeuvres which involved a high degree
of mutual trust and comprehension. While only some of the faces were
ecstatic, all were rapt. The ordinary world was shut out of this room,
whose inhabitants had apparently abandoned themselves with all their
souls to the performance of a complicated and solemn rite.
Odd as the spectacle was, Mr. Prohack enjoyed it. He enjoyed the youth
and the prettiness and the litheness of the brightly-dressed girls and
the stern masculinity of the men, and he enjoyed the thought that both
girls and men had had the wit to escape from the ordinary world into
this fantastic environment created out of four walls, a few Chinese
lanterns, some rouge, some stuffs, some spangles, friction between two
pieces of metal, and the profoundest instinct of nature. Beyond
everything he enjoyed the sight of the lithest and most elegant of the
girls, whom he knew to be Eliza Brating and who was dancing with a
partner whose skill obviously needed no lessons. He would have liked to
see his daughter Sissie in Eliza's place, but Sissie was playing the
man's role to a stout and nearly middle-aged lady, whose chief talent
for the rite appeared to be an iron determination.
Mr. Prohack was in danger of being hypnotised by the spectacle, but
suddenly the conflict between the disc and the needle grew more acute,
and Lizzie, the guardian, dragged the needle sharply from the bosom of
its antagonist. The sounds ceased, and the brains of the couples in the
studio, no longer inspired by the sounds, ceased to inspire the muscles
of the couples, and the rite suddenly finished. Mr. Prohack drew breath.
"To think," he reflected, "that this sort of thing is seriously going on
all over London at this very instant, and that many earnest persons are
making a livelihood from it, and that nobody but me perceives how
marvellous, charming, incomprehensible and disconcerting it is!"
He said to the guardian:
"There doesn't seem to be much 'lesson' about this business. Everybody
here seems to be able to dance all right."
To which Lizzie replied with a sagacious, even ironic, smile:
"You see, sir, on these gala nights they all do their very best."
"Father!"
Sissie had arrived upon him. Clearly she was preoccupied, if not
worried, and the unexpected sight of her parent forced her, as it were,
unwillingly from one absorbing train of ideas into another. She was
startled, self-conscious, nervous. Still, she jumped at him and kissed
him,--as if in a dream.
"Nothing the matter, is there?"
"Nothing."
"I'm frightfully busy to-night. Just come in here, will you?"
And she took him into the ladies' cloakroom--an apartment the like of
which he had never before seen. It had only one chair, in front of a
sort of dressing-table covered with mysterious apparatus and
instruments.
Mr. Prohack inspected his daughter as though she had been somebody
else's daughter.
"Well," said he. "You look just like a real business woman, except the
dress."
She was very attractive, very elegant, comically young (to him), and
very business-like in her smart, short frock, stockings, and shoes.
"Can't you understand," she objected firmly, "that this is my business
dress, just as much as a black frock and high collar would be in an
office?"
He gave a short, gentle laugh.
"I don't know what you're laughing at, dad," she reproached him, not
unkindly. "Anyhow, I'm glad some one's come at last. I was beginning to
think that my home had forgotten all about me. Even when I sent up for
some clothes no message came back."
The life-long experience of Mr. Prohack had been that important and
unusual interviews rarely corresponded with the anticipation of them,
and the present instance most sharply confirmed his experience. He had
expected to be forgiving an apologetic daughter, but the reality was
that he found himself in the dock. He hesitated for words, and Sissie
went on:
"Here have I been working myself to death reorganising this place after
Viola went--and I can tell you it needed reorganising! Haven't had a
minute in the mornings, and of course there are the lessons afternoon
and evening. And no one's been down to see how I was getting on, or even
written. I do think it's a bit steep. Mother might have known that if I
_had_ had any spare time I should have run up."
"I've been rather queer," he excused himself and the family. "And your
mother's been looking after me, and of course you know Charlie's still
in Glasgow."
"I don't know anything," she corrected him. "But you needn't tell me
that if you've been unwell mother's been looking after you. Does she
ever do anything else? Are you better? What was it? You _look_ all
right."
"Oh! General derangement. I haven't been to the office since you
decamped." He did not feel equal to telling her that he would not be
returning to the office for months. She had said that he looked all
right, and her quite honest if hasty verdict on his appearance gave him
a sense of guilt, and also renewed suspicions of Dr. Veiga.
"Not been to the office!" The statement justly amazed the girl, almost
shocked her. But she went on in a fresh, satirical accent recalling Mr.
Prohack's own: "You _must_ have been upset! But of course you're highly
nervous, dad, and I expect the excitement of the news of your fortune
was too much for you. I know exactly how you get when anything unusual
happens."
She had heard of the inheritance!
"I was going to tell you about that little affair," he said awkwardly.
"So you knew! Who told you?"
"Nobody in my family at any rate," she answered. "I heard of it from an
outsider, and of course from sheer pride I had to pretend that I knew
all about it. And what's more, father, you knew when you gave me that
fifty pounds, only you wouldn't let on. Don't deny it.... Naturally I'm
glad about it, very glad. And yet I'm not. I really rather regret it for
you and mother. You'll never be as happy again. Riches will spoil my
poor darling mother."
"That remains to be seen, Miss Worldly Wisemiss," he retorted with
unconvincing lightness. He was disturbed, and he was impressed, by her
indifference to the fortune. It appeared not to concern or to interest
her. She spoke not merely as one who objected to unearned wealth but as
one to whom the annals of the Prohack family were henceforth a matter of
minor importance. It was very strange, and Mr. Prohack had to fight
against a feeling of intimidation. The girl whom he had cherished for
over twenty years and whom he thought he knew to the core, was
absolutely astounding him by the revelation of her individuality. He
didn't know her. He was not her father. He was helpless before her.
"How are things here?" he demanded, amiably inquisitive, as an
acquaintance.
"Excellent," said she. "Jolly hard work, though."
"Yes, I should imagine so. Teaching men dancing! By Jove!"
"There's not so much difficulty about teaching men. The difficulty's
with the women. Father, they're awful. You can't imagine their
stupidity."
Lizzie glanced into the room. She simply glanced, and Sissie returned
the glance.
"You'll have to excuse me a bit, father," said Sissie. "I'll come back
as quick as I can. Don't go." She departed hurriedly.
"I'd better get out of this anyhow," thought Mr. Prohack, surveying the
ladies' cloakroom. "If one of 'em came in I should have to explain my
unexplainable presence in this sacred grot."
* * * * *
III
Having received no suggestion from his daughter as to how he should
dispose of himself while awaiting her leisure, Mr. Prohack made his way
back to the guardian's cubicle. And there he discovered a chubby and
intentionally-young man in the act of gazing through the small window
into the studio exactly as he himself had been gazing a few minutes
earlier.
"Hel_lo_, Prohack!" exclaimed the chubby and intentionally-young man,
with the utmost geniality and calmness.
"How d'ye do?" responded Mr. Prohack with just as much calmness and
perhaps ten per cent less geniality. Mr. Prohack was a peculiar fellow,
and that on this occasion he gave rather less geniality than he received
was due to the fact that he had never before spoken to the cupid in his
life and that he was wondering whether membership of the same club
entirely justified so informal a mode of address--without an
introduction and outside the club premises. For, like all modest men,
Mr. Prohack had some sort of a notion of his own dignity, a sort of a
notion that occasionally took him quite by surprise. Mr. Prohack did not
even know the surname of his aggressor. He only knew that he never
overheard other men call him anything but "Ozzie." Had not Mr. Prohack
been buried away all his life in the catacombs of the Treasury and thus
cut off from the great world-movement, he would have been fully aware
that Oswald Morfey was a person of importance in the West End of London,
that he was an outstanding phenomenon of the age, that he followed very
closely all the varying curves of the great world-movement, that he was
constantly to be seen on the pavements of Piccadilly, Bond Street, St.
James's Street, Pall Mall and Hammersmith, that he was never absent from
a good first night or a private view of very new or very old pictures or
a distinguished concert or a poetry-reading or a fashionable auction at
Christie's, that he received invitations to dinner for every night in
the week and accepted all those that did not clash with the others, that
in return for these abundant meals he gave about once a month a
tea-party in his trifling Japanese flat in Bruton Street, where the
sandwiches were as thin as the sound of the harpsichord which eighteenth
century ladies played at his request; and that he was in truth what Mr.
Asprey Chown called "social secretary" to Mr. Asprey Chown.
Mr. Prohack might be excused for his ignorance of this last fact, for
the relation between Asprey Chown and Ozzie was never very clearly
defined--at any rate by Ozzie. He had no doubt learned, from an enforced
acquaintance with the sides of motor-omnibuses, that Mr. Asprey Chown
was a theatre-manager of some activity, but he certainly had not truly
comprehended that Mr. Asprey Chown was head of one of the two great
rival theatrical combines and reputed to be the most accomplished
showman in the Western hemisphere, with a jewelled finger in notable
side-enterprises such as prize-fights, restaurants, and industrial
companies. The knowing ones from whom naught is hidden held that Asprey
Chown had never given a clearer proof of genius than in engaging this
harmless and indefatigable parasite of the West End to be his social
secretary. The knowing ones said further that whereas Ozzie was saving
money, nobody could be sure that Asprey Chown was saving money. The
engagement had a double effect--it at once put Asprey Chown into touch
with everything that could be useful to him for the purposes of special
booming, and it put Ozzie into touch with half the theatrical stars of
London--in an age when a first-rate heroine of revue was worth at least
two duchesses and a Dame in the scale of social values.
Mr. Oswald Morfey, doubtless in order to balance the modernity of his
taste in the arts, wore a tight black stock and a wide eyeglass ribbon
in the daytime, and in the evening permitted himself to associate a soft
silk shirt with a swallow-tail coat. It was to Mr. Prohack's secondary
(and more exclusive) club that he belonged. Inoffensive though he was,
he had managed innocently to offend Mr. Prohack. "Who is the fellow?"
Mr. Prohack had once asked a friend in the club, and having received no
answer but "Ozzie," Mr. Prohack had added: "He's a perfect ass," and had
given as a reason for this harsh judgment: "Well, I can't stick the way
he walks across the hall."
In the precincts of the dance-studio Mr. Oswald Morfey said in that
simple, half-lisping tone and with that wide-open child-like glance that
characterised most of his remarks:
"A very prosperous little affair here!" Having said this, he let his
eyeglass fall into the full silkiness of his shirt-front, and turned and
smiled very amicably and agreeably on Mr. Prohack, who could not help
thinking: "Perhaps after all you aren't such a bad sort of an idiot."
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Do you often get as far as Putney?" For Mr.
Oswald Morfey, enveloped as he unquestionably was in the invisible aura
of the West End, seemed conspicuously out of place in a dance-studio in
a side-street in Putney, having rather the air of an angelic visitant.
"Well, now I come to think of it, I don't!" Mr. Morfey answered nearly
all questions as though they were curious, disconcerting questions that
took him by surprise. This mannerism was universally attractive--until
you got tired of it.
Mr. Prohack was now faintly attracted by it,--so that he said, in a
genuine attempt at good-fellowship:
"You know I can't for the life of me remember your name. You must excuse
me. My memory for names is not what it was. And I hate to dissemble,
don't you?"
The announcement was a grave shock to Mr. Oswald Morfey, who imagined
that half the taxi-drivers in London knew him by sight. Nevertheless he
withstood the shock like a little man of the world, and replied with
miraculous and sincere politeness: "I'm sure there's no reason why you
should remember my name." And he vouchsafed his name.
"Of course! Of course!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack, with a politeness equally
miraculous, for the word "Morfey" had no significance for the benighted
official. "How stupid of me!"
"By the way," said Mr. Morfey in a lower, confidential tone. "Your Eagle
will be ready to-morrow instead of next week."
"My Eagle?"
"Your new car."
It was Mr. Prohack's turn to be staggered, and to keep his nerve. Not
one word had he heard about the purchase of a car since Charlie's
telegram from Glasgow. He had begun to think that his wife had either
forgotten the necessity of a car or was waiting till his more complete
recovery before troubling him to buy it. And he had taken care to say
nothing about it himself, for he had discovered, upon searching his own
mind, that his interest in motor-cars was not an authentic interest and
that he had no desire at all to go motoring in pursuit of health. And
lo! Eve had been secretly engaged in the purchase of a car for him! Oh!
A remarkable woman, Eve: she would stop at nothing when his health was
in question. Not even at a two thousand pound car.
"Ah, yes!" said Mr. Prohack, with as much tranquillity as though his
habit was to buy a car once a week or so. "To-morrow, you say? Good!"
Was the fellow then a motor-car tout working on commission?
"You see," said Ozzie, "my old man owns a controlling interest in the
Eagle Company. That's how I happen to know."
"I see," murmured Mr. Prohack, speculating wildly in private as to the
identity of Ozzie's old man.
When Ozzie with a nod and a smile and a re-fixing of his monocle left
the cubicle to enter the studio, he left Mr. Prohack freshly amazed at
the singularities of the world and of women, even the finest women. How
disturbing to come down to Putney in a taxi-cab in order to learn from a
stranger that you have bought a two thousand pound car which is to come
into your possession on the morrow! The dangerousness, the excitingness,
of being rich struck Mr. Prohack very forcibly.
A few minutes later he beheld a sight which affected him more deeply,
and less pleasantly, than anything else in an evening of thunderclaps.
Through the little window he saw Sissie dancing with Ozzie Morfey. And
although Sissie was not gazing upward ecstatically into Ozzie's
face--she could not because they were of a size--and although her
features had a rather stern, fixed expression, Mr. Prohack knew, from
his knowledge of her, that Sissie was in a secret ecstasy of enjoyment
while dancing with this man. He did not like her ecstasy. Was it
possible that she, so sensible and acute, had failed to perceive that
the fellow was a perfect ass? For in spite of his amiability, a perfect
ass the fellow was. The sight of his Sissie held in the arms of Ozzie
Morfey revolted Mr. Prohack. But he was once again helpless. And the
most sinister suspicions crawled into his mind. Why was the resplendent,
the utterly correct Ozzie dancing in a dancing studio in Putney?
Certainly he was not there to learn dancing. He danced to perfection.
The feet of the partners seemed to be married into a mystic unity of
direction. The performance was entrancing to watch. Could it be possible
that Ozzie was there because Sissie was there? Darker still, could it be
possible that Sissie had taken a share in the studio for any reason
other than a purely commercial reason?
"He thinks you're a darling," said Sissie to her father afterwards when
he and she and Eliza Brating, alone together in the studio, were
informally consuming buns and milk in the corner where the stove was.
The talk ran upon dancers, and whether Ozzie Morfey was not one of the
finest dancers in London. Was Sissie's tone quite natural? Mr. Prohack
could not be sure. Eliza Brating said she must go at once in order not
to miss the last tram home. Mr. Prohack, without thinking, said that he
would see her home in his taxi, which had been ruthlessly ticking his
fortune away for much more than an hour.
"Kiss mother for me," said Sissie, "and tell her that she's a horrid
old thing and I shall come along and give her a piece of my mind one of
these days." And she gave him the kiss for her mother.
And as she kissed him, Mr. Prohack was very proud of his daughter--so
efficient, so sound, so straight, so graceful.
"She's all right, anyway," he reflected. And yet she could be ecstatic
in the arms of that perfect ass! And in the taxi: "Fancy me seeing home
this dancing-mistress!" Eliza lived at Brook Green. She was very
elegant, and quite unexceptionable until she opened her mouth. She
related to him how her mother, who had once been a _premier sujet_ in
the Covent Garden ballet, was helpless from sciatica. But she related
this picturesque and pride-causing detail in a manner very insipid,
naive, and even vulgar, (After all there was a difference between First
Division and Second Division in the Civil Service!) She was boring him
terribly before they reached Brook Green. She took leave with a
deportment correct but acquired at an age too late. Still, he had liked
to see her home in the taxi. She was young, and she was an object
pleasing to the eye. He realised that he was not accustomed to the
propinquity of young women. What would his cronies at the Club say to
the escapade?... Odd, excessively odd, that the girl should be Sissie's
partner, in a business enterprise of so odd a character!... The next
thing was to meet Eve after the escapade. Should he keep to the
defensive, or should he lead off with an attack apropos of the Eagle
car?
CHAPTER IX
COLLISION
I
After an eventful night Mr. Prohack woke up late to breakfast in bed.
Theoretically he hated breakfast in bed, but in practice he had recently
found that the inconveniences to himself were negligible compared to the
intense and triumphant pleasure which his wife took in seeing him
breakfast in bed, in being fully dressed while he was in pyjamas and
dressing-gown, and in presiding over the meal and over him. Recently
Marian had formed the habit of rising earlier and appearing to be very
busy upon various minute jobs at an hour when, a few weeks previously,
she would scarcely have decided that day had given place to night. Mr.
Prohack, without being able precisely to define it, thought that he
understood the psychology of the change in this unique woman. Under
ordinary circumstances he would have been worried by his sense of
fatigue, but now, as he had nothing whatever to do, he did not much care
whether he was tired or not. Neither the office nor the State would
suffer through his lack of tone.
The events of the night had happened exclusively inside Mr. Prohack's
head. Nor were they traceable to the demeanour of his wife when he
returned home from the studio. She had mysteriously behaved to him as
though nocturnal excursions to disgraceful daughters in remote quarters
of London were part of his daily routine. She had been very sweet and
very incurious. Whereon Mr. Prohack had said to himself: "She has some
diplomatic reason for being an angel." And even if she had not been an
angel, even if she had been the very reverse of an angel, Mr. Prohack
would not have minded, and his night would not have been thereby upset;
for he regarded her as a beautiful natural phenomenon is regarded by a
scientist, lovingly and wonderingly, and he was incapable of being
irritated for more than a few seconds by anything that might be done or
said by this forest creature of the prime who had strayed charmingly
into the twentieth century. He was a very fortunate husband.
No! The eventfulness of the night originated in reflection upon the
relations between Sissie and Ozzie Morfey. If thoughts could take
physical shape and solidity, the events of the night would have amounted
to terrible collisions and catastrophes in the devil-haunted abysses of
Mr. Prohack's brain. The forces of evil were massacring all opponents
between three and four a.m. It was at this period Mr. Prohack was
convinced that Sissie, in addition to being an indescribably heartless
daughter, was a perfect fool hoodwinked by a perfect ass, and that
Ozzie's motive in the affair was not solely or chiefly admiration for
Sissie, but admiration of the great fortune which, he had learnt, had
fallen into the lap of Sissie's father. After five o'clock, according to
the usual sequence, the forces of evil lost ground, and at six-thirty,
when the oblong of the looking-glass glimmered faintly in the dawn, Mr.
Prohack said roundly: "I am an idiot," and went to sleep.
"Now, darling," said Eve when he emerged from the bathroom. "Don't waste
any more time. I want you to give me your opinion about something
downstairs."
"Child," said Mr. Prohack. "What on earth do you mean--'wasting time'?
Haven't you insisted, and hasn't your precious doctor insisted, that I
must read the papers for an hour in bed after I've had my breakfast in
bed? Talk about 'wasting time' indeed!"
"Yes, of course darling," Eve concurred, amazingly angelic. "I don't
mean you've been wasting time; only I don't want you to waste any _more_
time."
"My mistake," said Mr. Prohack.
From mere malice and wickedness he spun out the business of dressing to
nearly its customary length, and twice Eve came uneasily into the
bedroom to see if she could be of assistance to him. No nurse could have
been so beautifully attentive. During one of her absences he slipped
furtively downstairs into the drawing-room, where he began to strum on
the piano, though the room was yet by no means properly warm. She came
after him, admirably pretending not to notice that he was behaving
unusually. She was attired for the street, and she carried his hat and
his thickest overcoat.
"You're coming out," said she, holding up the overcoat cajolingly.
"That's just where you're mistaken," said he.
"But I want to show you something."
"What do you want to show me?"
"You shall see when you come out."
"Is it by chance the bird of the mountains that I am to see?"
"The bird of the mountains? My dear Arthur! What are you driving at
now?"
"Is it the Eagle car?" And as she staggered speechless under the blow he
proceeded: "Ah! Did you think you could deceive _me_ with your infantile
conspiracies and your tacit deceits and your false smiles?"
She blushed.
"Some one's told you. And I do think it's a shame!"
"And who should have told me? Who have I seen? I suppose you think I
picked up the information at Putney last night. And haven't you opened
all my letters since I was ill, on the pretext of saving me worry? Shall
I tell you how I know? I knew from your face. Your face, my innocent,
can't be read like a book. It can be read like a newspaper placard, and
for days past I've seen on it, 'Extra special. Exciting purchase of a
motor-car by a cunning wife.'" Then he laughed. "No, chit. That fellow
Oswald Morfey, let it out last night."
When she had indignantly enquired how Oswald Morfey came to be mixed up
in her private matters, she said:
"Well, darling, I hope I needn't tell you that my _sole_ object was to
save you trouble. The car simply had to be bought, and as quickly as
possible, so I did it. Need I tell you--"
"You needn't, certainly," Mr. Prohack agreed, and going to the window he
lifted the curtain. Yes. There stood a real car, a landaulette, with the
illustrous eagle on the front of its radiator, and a real chauffeur by
its side. The thing seemed entirely miraculous to Mr. Prohack; and he
was rather impressed by his wife's daring and enterprise. After all, it
was somewhat of an undertaking for an unworldly woman to go out alone
into the world and buy a motor-car and engage a chauffeur, not to
mention clothing the chauffeur. But Mr. Prohack kept all his
imperturbability.
"Isn't it lovely?"
"Is it paid for?"
"Oh, no!"
"Didn't you have to pay any deposit?"
"Of course I didn't. I gave your name, and that was sufficient. We
needn't keep it if we don't like it after the trial run."
"And is it insured?"
"Of course, darling."
"And what about the licence?"
"Oh! The Eagle Company saw to all those stupid things for me."
"And how many times have you forged my signature while I've been lying
on a bed of pain?"
"The fact is, darling, I made the purchase in my own name. Now come
_along_. We're going round the park."
The way she patted his overcoat when she had got it on to him...! The
way she took him by the hand and pulled him towards the drawing-room
door...! She had done an exceedingly audacious deed, and her spirits
rose as she became convinced from his demeanour that she had not pushed
audacity too far. (For she was never absolutely sure of him.)
"Wait one moment," said Mr. Prohack releasing himself and slipping back
to the window.
"What's the matter?"
"I merely desired to look at the chauffeur's face. Is it a real
chauffeur? Not an automaton?"
"Arthur!"
"You're sure he's quite human?" Mrs. Prohack closed the piano, and then
stamped her foot.
"Listen," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm about to trust my life to the
mysterious being inside that uniform. Did you imagine that I would trust
my life to a perfect stranger? In another half hour he and I may be
lying in hospital side by side. And I don't even know his name! Fetch
him in, my dove, and allow me to establish relations with him. But
confide to me his name first." The expression on Mrs. Prohack's features
was one of sublime forbearance under ineffable provocation.
"This is Carthew," she announced, bringing the chauffeur into the
drawing-room.
Carthew was a fairly tall, fairly full-bodied, grizzled man of about
forty; he carried his cap and one gauntleted glove in one gloved hand,
and his long, stiff green overcoat slanted down from his neck to his
knees in an unbroken line. He had the impassivity of a policeman.
"Good morning, Carthew," Mr. Prohack began, rising. "I thought that you
and I would like to make one another's acquaintance."
"Yes, sir."
Mr. Prohack held out his hand, which Carthew calmly took.
"Will you sit down?"
"Thank you, sir."
"Have a cigarette?" Carthew hesitated.
"Do you mind if I have one of my own, sir?"
"These are Virginian."
"Oh! Thank you, sir." And Carthew took a cigarette from Mr. Prohack's
case.
"Light?"
"After you, sir."
"No, no."
"Thank you, sir."
Carthew coughed, puffed, and leaned back a little in his chair. At this
point Mrs. Prohack left the room. (She said afterwards that she left the
room because she couldn't have borne to be present when Carthew's back
broke the back of the chair.)
Carthew sat silent.
"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "What do you think of the car? I ought to tell
you I know nothing of motors myself, and this is the first one I've ever
had."
"The Eagle is a very good car, sir. If you ask me I should say it was
light on tyres and a bit thirsty with petrol. It's one of them cars as
anybody can _drive_--if you understand what I mean. I mean anybody can
make it _go_. But of course that's only the beginning of what I call
driving."
"Just so," agreed Mr. Prohack, drawing by his smile a very faint smile
from Carthew. "My son seems to think it's about the best car on the
market."
"Well, sir, I've been mixed up with cars pretty well all my life--I mean
since I was twenty--"
"Have you indeed!"
"I have, sir--" Carthew neatly flicked some ash on the carpet, and Mr.
Prohack thoughtfully did the same--"I have, sir, and I haven't yet come
across the best car on the market, if you understand what I mean."
"Perfectly," said Mr. Prohack.
Carthew sat silent.
"But it's a very good car. Nobody could wish for a better. I'll say
that," he added at length.
"Had many accidents in your time?"
"I've been touched, sir, but I've never touched anything myself. You can
have an accident while you're drawn up alongside the kerb. It rather
depends on how many fools have been let loose in the traffic, doesn't
it, sir, if you understand what I mean."
"Exactly," said Mr. Prohack.
Carthew sat silent.
"I gather you've been through the war," Mr. Prohack began again.
"I was in the first Territorial regiment that landed in France, and I
got my discharge July 1919."
"Wounded?"
"Well, sir, I've been blown up twice and buried once and pitched into
the sea once, but nothing ever happened to me."
"I see you don't wear any ribbons."
"It's like this, sir. I've seen enough ribbons on chests since the
armistice. It isn't as if I was one of them conscripts."
"No," murmured Mr. Prohack thoughtfully; then brightening: "And as soon
as you were discharged you went back to your old job?"
"I did and I didn't, sir. The fact is, I've been driving an ambulance
for the City of London, but as soon as I heard of something private I
chucked that. I can't say as I like these Corporations. There's a bit
too much stone wall about them Corporations, for my taste."
"Family man?" asked Mr. Prohack lightly. "I've two children myself and
both of them can drive."
"Really, sir, I am a family man, as ye might say, but my wife and me,
we're best apart."
"Sorry to hear that. I didn't want to--"
"Oh, not at all, sir! That's all right. But you see--the war--me being
away and all that--I've got the little boy. He's nine."
"Well," said Mr. Prohack, jumping up nervously, "suppose we go and have
a look at the car, shall we?"
"Certainly, sir," said Carthew, throwing the end of his cigarette into
the fender, and hastening.
"My dove," said Mr. Prohack to his wife in the hall. "I congratulate you
on your taste in chauffeurs. Carthew and I have laid the foundations of
a lasting friendship."
"I really wonder you asked him to smoke in the drawing-room," Mrs.
Prohack critically observed.
"Why? He saved England for me; and now I'm trusting my life to him."
"I do believe you'd _like_ there to be a revolution in this country."
"Not at all, angel! And I don't think there'll be one. But I'm taking my
precautions in case there should be one."
"He's only a chauffeur."
"That's very true. He was doing some useful work, driving an ambulance
to hospitals. But we've stopped that. He's now only a chauffeur to the
idle rich."
"Oh, Arthur! I wish you wouldn't try to be funny on such subjects. You
know you don't mean it."
Mrs. Prohack was now genuinely reproachful, and the first conjugal
joy-ride might have suffered from a certain constraint had it taken
place. It did not, however, take place. Just as Carthew was holding out
the rug (which Eve's prodigious thoroughness had remembered to buy)
preparatory to placing it on the knees of his employers, a truly
gigantic automobile drove up to the door, its long bonnet stopping
within six inches of the Eagle's tail-lantern. The Eagle looked like
nothing at all beside it. Mr. Prohack knew that leviathan. He had many
times seen it in front of the portals of his principal club. It was the
car of his great club crony, Sir Paul Spinner, the "city magnate."
Sir Paul, embossed with carbuncles, got out, and was presently being
presented to Eve,--for the friendship between Mr. Prohack and Sir Paul
had been a purely club friendship. Like many such friendships it had had
no existence beyond the club, and neither of the cronies knew anything
of real interest about the domestic circumstances of the other. Sir Paul
was very apologetic to Eve, but he imperiously desired an interview with
Mr. Prohack at once. Eve most agreeably and charmingly said that she
would take a little preliminary airing in the car by herself, and return
for her husband. Mr. Prohack would have preferred her to wait for him;
but, though Eve was sagacious enough at all normal times, when she got
an idea into her head that idea ruthlessly took precedence of everything
else in the external world. Moreover the car was her private creation,
and she was incapable of resisting its attractions one minute longer.
II
"I hear you've come into half a million, Arthur," said Paul Spinner,
after he had shown himself very friendly and optimistic about Mr.
Prohack's health and given the usual bulletin about his own carbuncles
and the shortcomings of the club.
"But you don't believe it, Paul."
"I don't," agreed Paul. "Things get about pretty fast in the City and we
can size them up fairly well; and I should say, putting two and two
together, that a hundred and fifty thousand would be nearer the mark."
"It certainly is," said Mr. Prohack.
If Paul Spinner had suggested fifty thousand, Mr. Prohack would have
corrected him, but being full of base instincts he had no impulse to
correct the larger estimate, which was just as inaccurate.
"Well, well! It's a most romantic story and I congratulate you on it.
No such luck ever happened to me." Sir Paul made this remark in a tone
to indicate that he had had practically no luck himself. And he really
believed that he had had no luck, though the fact was that he touched no
enterprise that failed. Every year he signed a huger cheque for
super-tax, and every year he signed it with a gesture signifying that he
was signing his own ruin.
This distressing illusion of Sir Paul's was probably due to his
carbuncles, which of all pathological phenomena are among the most
productive of a pessimistic philosophy. The carbuncles were well known
up and down Harley Street. They were always to be cured and they never
were cured. They must have cost their owner about as much as his
motor-car for upkeep--what with medical fees, travelling and foreign
hotels--and nobody knew whether they remained uncured because they were
incurable or because the medical profession thought it would be cruel at
one stroke to deprive itself of a regular income and Sir Paul of his
greatest hobby. The strange thing was that Sir Paul with all his
powerful general sagacity and shrewdness, continued firmly, despite
endless disappointments, in the mystical faith that one day the
carbuncles would be abolished.
"I won't beat about the bush," said he. "We know one another. I came
here to talk frankly and I'll talk frankly."
"You go right ahead," Mr. Prohack benevolently encouraged him.
"First of all I should like to give you just the least hint of warning
against that fellow Softly Bishop. I daresay you know something' about
him--"
"I know nothing about him, except the way he looks down his nose. But no
man who looks down his nose the way he looks down his nose is going to
influence me in the management of my financial affairs. I'm only an
official; I should be a lamb in the City; but I have my safeguards, old
chap. Thanks for the tip all the same."
Sir Paul Spinner laughed hoarsely, as Mr. Prohack had made him laugh
hundreds of times in the course of their friendship. And Mr. Prohack was
aware of a feeling of superiority to Sir Paul. The feeling grew steadily
in his breast, and he was not quite sure how it originated. Perhaps it
was due to a note of dawning obsequiousness in Sir Paul's laugh,
reminding Mr. Prohack of the ancient proverb that the jokes of the
exalted are always side-splitting.
"As I say," Sir Paul proceeded, "you and I know each other."
Mr. Prohack nodded, with a trace of impatience against unnecessary
repetition. Yet he was suddenly struck with the odd thought that Sir
Paul certainly did not know him, but only odd bits of him; and he was
doubtful whether he knew Sir Paul. He saw an obese man of sixty sitting
in the very chair that a few moments ago had been occupied by Carthew
the chauffeur, a man with big purplish features and a liverish eye, a
man smoking a plutocratic and heavenly cigar and eating it at the same
time, a man richly dressed and braided and jewelled, a man whose boots
showed no sign of a crease, an obvious millionaire of the old type, in
short a man who was practically all prejudices and waste-products. And
he wondered why and how that man had become his friend and won his
affection. Sir Paul looked positively coarse in Mr. Prohack's frail
Chippendale drawing-room, seeming to need for suitable environment the
pillared marble and gilt of the vast Club. Well, after having eaten many
hundreds of meals and drunk many hundreds of cups of coffee in the
grunting society of Sir Paul, all that Mr. Prohack could be sure of
knowing about Sir Paul was, first, that he had an absolutely unspotted
reputation; second, that he was a very decent, simple-minded, kindly,
ignorant fellow (ignorant, that is, in the matters that interested Mr.
Prohack); third, that he instinctively mistrusted intellect and
brilliance; fourth, that for nearly four years he had been convinced
that Germany would win the war, and fifth, that he was capable of
astounding freaks of generosity. Stay, there was another item,--Sir
Paul's invariable courtesy to the club servants, which courtesy he
somehow contrived to combine with continual grumbling. The club servants
held him in affection. It was probably this sixth item that outweighed
any of the others in Mr. Prohack's favourable estimate of the financier.
And then Mr. Prohack, as in a dream, heard from the lips of Paul Spinner
the words, "oil concessions in Roumania." In a flash, in an earthquake,
in a blinding vision, Mr. Prohack instantaneously understood the origin
of his queer nascent feeling of superiority to old Paul. What he had
previously known subconsciously he now knew consciously. Old Paul who
had no doubt been paying in annual taxes about ten times the amount of
Mr. Prohack's official annual salary; old Paul whose name was the
synonym for millions and the rumours of whose views on the stock-markets
caused the readers of financial papers to tremble; old Paul was after
Mr. Prohack's money! Marvellous, marvellous, thrice marvellous money!...
It was the most astounding, the most glorious thing that ever happened.
Mr. Prohack immediately began to have his misgivings about Sir Paul
Spinner. Simultaneously he felt sorry for old Paul. And such was his
constraint that he made the motion of swallowing, and had all he could
do not to blush.
Mr. Prohack might be a lamb in the City, but he had a highly trained
mind, and a very firm grasp of the mere technique of finance. Therefore
Sir Paul could explain himself succinctly and precisely in technical
terms, and he did so--with much skill and a sort of unconsidered
persuasiveness, realising in his rough commonsense that there was no
need to drive ideas into Mr. Prohack's head with a steam-hammer, or to
intoxicate him with a heady vapour of superlatives.
In a quarter of an hour Mr. Prohack learnt that Sir Paul was promoting a
strictly private syndicate as a preliminary to the formation of a big
company for the exploitation of certain options on Roumanian
oil-territory which Sir Paul held. He learnt about the reports of the
trial borings. He learnt about the character and the experience of the
expert whom Sir Paul had sent forth to Roumania. He learnt about the
world-supply of oil and the world-demand for oil. He learnt about the
great rival oil-groups that were then dividing the universe of oil. He
had the entire situation clearly mapped on his brain. Next he obtained
some startling inside knowledge about the shortage of liquid capital in
the circles of "big money," and then followed Sir Paul's famous club
disquisition upon the origin of the present unsaleableness of securities
and the appalling uneasiness, not to say collapse, of markets.
"What we want is stability, old boy. We want to be left alone. We're
being governed to death. Social reform is all right. I believe in it,
but everything depends on the pace. Change there ought to be, but it
mustn't be like a transformation scene in a pantomime."
And so on.
Mr. Prohack was familiar with it all. He expected the culminating part
of the exposition. But Sir Paul curved off towards the navy and the need
of conserving in British hands a more than adequate gush of oil for the
navy. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have left out the navy. And
then the Empire was reached. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have
left out the Empire. Finally Sir Paul arrived at the point.
"I've realised all I can in reason and I'm eighty thousand short. Of
course I can get it, get it easily, but not without giving away a good
part of my show in quarters that I should prefer to keep quite in the
dark. I thought of you--you're clean outside all that sort of thing, and
also I know you'd lie low. You might make a hundred per cent; you might
make two hundred per cent. But I'll guarantee you this--you won't lose,
whatever happens. Of course your capital may not be liquid. You mayn't
be able to get at it. I don't know. But I thought it was just worth
mentioning to you, and so I said to myself I'd look in here on my way to
the City."
Sir Paul Spinner touting for a miserable eighty thousand pounds!
"Hanged if I know _how_ my capital is!" said Mr. Prohack.
"I suppose your lawyer knows. Smathe, isn't it?... I heard so."
"How soon do you want an answer, yes or no?" Mr. Prohack asked, with a
feeling that he had his back to the wall and old Paul had a gun.
"I don't want an answer now, anyhow, old boy. You must think it over.
You see, once we've got the thing, I shall set the two big groups
bidding against each other for it, and we shall see some fun. And I
wouldn't ask them for cash payments. Only for payment in their own
shares--which are worth more than money."
"Want an answer to-morrow?"
"Could you make it to-night?" Sir Paul surprisingly answered. "And
assuming you say yes--I only say assuming--couldn't you run down with me
to Smathe's now and find out about your capital? That wouldn't bind you
in any way. I'm particularly anxious you should think it over very
carefully. And, by the way, better keep these papers to refer to. But if
you can't get at your capital, no use troubling further. That's the
first thing to find out."
"I can't go to Smathe's now," Mr. Prohack stammered.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm going out with my wife in the car."
"But, my dear old boy, it's a big thing, and it's urgent."
"Yes, I quite see that. But I've got to go with Marian. I'll tell you
what I can do. I'll telephone Smathe that you're coming down to see him
yourself, and he must tell you everything. That'll be best. Then I'll
let you know my decision later."
As they parted, Sir Paul said:
"We know each other, and you may take it from me it's all right. I'll
say no more. However, you think it over."
"Oh! I will!"
Old Paul touting for eighty thousand pounds! A wondrous world! A
stupefying world!
Mr. Prohack, who didn't know what to do with a hundred thousand pounds,
saw himself the possessor of a quarter of a million, and was illogically
thrilled by the prospect. But the risk! Supposing that honest Paul was
wrong for once, or suppose he was carried off in the night by a
carbuncle,--Mr. Prohack might find himself a pauper with a mere trifle
of twenty thousand pounds to his name.
As soon as he had telephoned he resumed his hat and coat and went out on
to the pavement to look for his car, chauffeur and wife. There was not a
sign of them.
* * * * *
III
Mr. Prohack was undeniably a very popular man. He had few doubts
concerning the financial soundness of old Paul's proposition; but he
hesitated, for reasons unconnected with finance or with domesticity,
about accepting it. And he conceived the idea (which none but a very
peculiar man would have conceived) of discussing the matter with some
enemy of old Paul's. Now old Paul had few enemies. Mr. Prohack, however,
could put his hand on one,--Mr. Francis Fieldfare--the editor of an
old-established and lucrative financial weekly, and familiar to readers
of that and other organs as "F.F." Mr. Fieldfare's offices were quite
close to Mr. Prohack's principal club, of which Mr. Fieldfare also was a
member, and Mr. Fieldfare had the habit of passing into the club about
noon and reading the papers for an hour, lunching early, and leaving the
club again just as the majority of the members were ordering their
after-lunch coffee. Mr. Fieldfare pursued this course because he had a
deep instinct for being in the minority. Mr. Prohack looked at his
watch. The resolution of every man is limited in quantity. Only in mad
people is resolution inexhaustible. Mr. Prohack had no more resolution
than becomes an average sane fellow, and his resolution to wait for his
wife had been seriously tried by the energetic refusal to go with
Spinner to see Smathe. It now suddenly gave out.
"Pooh!" said Mr. Prohack. "I've waited long enough for her. She'll now
have to wait a bit for me."
And off he went by taxi to his club. The visit, he reflected, would
serve the secondary purpose of an inconspicuous re-entry into club-life
after absence from it.
He thought:
"They may have had an accident with that car. One day she's certain to
have an accident anyhow,--she's so impulsive."
Of course Mr. Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he
ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around
at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed
out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F.
just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to
observe that F.F. had evidently heard neither of his illness nor of his
inheritance.
Mr. Fieldfare was a spare, middle-aged man, of apparently austere habit;
short, shabby; a beautiful, resigned face, burning eyes, and a soft
voice. He was weighed down, and had been weighed down for thirty years,
by a sense of the threatened immediate collapse of society--of all
societies, and by the solemn illusion that he more clearly than anybody
else understood the fearful trend of events.
Mr. Prohack had once, during the war, remarked on seeing F.F. glance at
the tape in the Club: "Look at F.F. afraid lest there may be some good
news." Nevertheless he liked F.F.
As editor of a financial weekly, F.F. naturally had to keep well under
control his world-sadness. High finance cannot prosper in an atmosphere
of world-sadness, and hates it. F.F. ought never to have become the
editor of a financial weekly; but he happened to be an expert
statistician, an honest man and a courageous man, and an expert in the
pathology of stock-markets, and on this score his proprietors excused
the slight traces of world-sadness occasionally to be found in the
paper. He might have left his post and obtained another; but to be
forced by fate to be editor of a financial weekly was F.F.'s chief
grievance in life, and he loved a good grievance beyond everything.
"But, my dear fellow," said F.F. with his melancholy ardent glance, when
Mr. Prohack had replied suitably to his opening question. "I'd no idea
you'd been unwell. I hope it isn't what's called a breakdown."
"Oh, no!" Mr. Prohack laughed nervously. "But you know what doctors are.
A little rest has been prescribed."
F.F. gazed at him softly compassionate, as if to indicate that nothing
but trouble could be expected under the present political regime. They
examined the tape together.
"Things can't go on much longer like this," observed F.F.
comprehensively, in front of the morning's messages from the capitals of
the world.
"Still," said Mr. Prohack, "we've won the war, haven't we?"
"I suppose we have," said F.F. and sighed.
Mr. Prohack felt that he had no more time for preliminaries, and in
order to cut them short started some ingenious but quite inexcusable
lying.
"You didn't chance to see old Paul Spinner going out as you came in?"
"No," answered F.F. "Why?"
"Nothing. Only a man in the morning-room was wanting to know if he was
still in the Club, and I told him I'd see."
"I hear," said F.F. after a moment, and in a lower voice, "I hear he's
getting up some big new oil scheme."
"Ah!" murmured Mr. Prohack, delighted at so favourable a coincidence,
with a wonderful imitation of casualness. "And what may that be?"
"Nobody knows. Some people would give a good deal to know. But if I'm
any judge of my Spinner they won't know till he's licked off all the
cream. It's marvellous to me how Spinner and his sort can keep on
devoting themselves to the old ambitions while the world's breaking up.
Marvellous!"
"Money, you mean?"
"Personal aggrandisement."
"Well," answered Mr. Prohack, with a judicial, detached air. "I've
always found Spinner a very decent agreeable chap."
"Oh, yes! Agreed! Agreed! They're all too confoundedly agreeable for
anything, all that lot are."
"But surely he's honest?"
"Quite. As straight a man as ever breathed, especially according to his
own lights. All his enterprises are absolutely what is known as 'sound.'
They all make rich people richer, and in particular they make _him_
richer, though I bet even he's been feeling the pinch lately. They all
have."
"Still, I expect old Spinner desires the welfare of the country just as
much as any one else. It's not all money with him."
"No. But did you ever know Spinner touch anything that didn't mean money
in the first place? I never did. What he and his lot mean by the welfare
of the country is the stability of the country _as it is_. They see the
necessity for development, improvement in the social scheme. Oh, yes!
They see it and admit it. Then they go to church, or they commune with
heaven on the golf-course, and their prayer is: 'Give us needed change,
O Lord, but not just yet.'"
The pair moved to the morning-room.
"Look here," said Mr. Prohack, lightly, ignoring the earnestness in
F.F.'s tone. "Supposing you had a bit of money, say eighty thousand
pounds, and the chance to put it into one of old who-is-it's schemes,
what would you do?"
"I should be ashamed to have eighty thousand pounds," F.F. replied with
dark whispering passion. "And in any case nothing would induce me to
have any dealings with the gang."
"Are they all bad?"
"They're all bad, all! They are all anti-social. All! They are all a
curse to the country and to all mankind." F.F. had already rung the
bell, and he now beckoned coldly to the waitress who entered the room.
"Everybody who supports the present Government is guilty of a crime
against human progress. Bring me a glass of that brown sherry I had
yesterday--you know the one--and three small pieces of cheese."
Mr. Prohack went away to the telephone, and got Paul Spinner at Smathe's
office.
"I only wanted to tell you that I've decided to come into your show, if
Smathe can arrange for the money. I've thought it all over carefully,
and I'm yours, old boy."
He hung up the receiver immediately.
* * * * *
IV
The excursion to the club had taken longer than Mr. Prohack had
anticipated, and when he got back home it was nearly lunch-time. No sign
of an Eagle car or any other car in front of the house! Mr. Prohack let
himself in. The sounds of a table being set came from the dining-room.
He opened the door there. Machin met him at the door. Each withdrew from
the other, avoiding a collision.
"Your mistress returned?"
"Yes, sir." Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.
"Where is she?"
"I was just coming to tell you, sir. She told me to say that she was
lying down."
"Oh!"
Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs. He
had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the
placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not
possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show.
She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete
confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all
her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he
was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and
that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity
were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his
sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom
in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of
the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely
resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite
unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of
a fellow and the smartest man in the world.
Further, she would draw in the horns of her secret schemes of
expenditure. She would say that she had intended to do so-and-so and to
buy so-and-so, but that perhaps it would be better, in view of the
uncertainties of destiny, neither to do nor to buy so-and-so. In short,
she would succeed in conveying to him the idea that to live with him was
like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. She loved to live with him, the compensations were exquisite,
and moreover what would be his fate if he were alone? Still, it was like
being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. And she would cling closer to him and point to the red sun
setting among black clouds of tempest. And this would continue until he
could throw say about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds into her lap,
whereupon she would calmly assert that in her opinion he and she had
really been safe all the while on the glassy lake of the Serpentine in a
steamer.
"I ought to have thought of all that before," he said to himself. "And
if I had I should have bought houses, something for her to look at and
touch. And even then she would have suggested that if I hadn't been a
coward I could have done better than houses. She would have found in
_The Times_ every day instances of companies paying twenty and thirty
per cent ... No! It would have been impossible for me to invest the
money without losing her esteem for me as a man of business. I wish to
heaven I hadn't got any money. So here goes!"
And he burst with assumed confidence into the bedroom. And
simultaneously, to intensify his unease, the notion that profiteering
was profiteering, whether in war or in peace, and the notion that F.F.
was a man of lofty altruistic ideals, surged through his distracted
mind.
Eve was lying on the bed. She looked very small on the bed, smaller than
usual. At the sound of the door opening she said, without moving her
head--he could not see her face from the door:
"Is that you, Arthur?"
"Yes, what's the matter?"
"Just put my cloak over my feet, will you?"
He came forward and took the cloak off a chair.
"What's the matter?" he repeated, arranging the cloak.
"I'm not hurt, dearest, I assure you I'm not--not at all." She was
speaking in a faint, weak voice, like a little child's.
"Then you've had an accident?"
She glanced up at him sideways, timidly, compassionately, and nodded.
"You mustn't be upset. I told Machin to go on with her work and not to
say anything to you about it. I preferred to tell you myself. I know how
sensitive you are where I'm concerned."
Mr. Prohack had to adjust his thoughts, somewhat violently, to the new
situation, and he made no reply; but he was very angry about the mere
existence of motor-cars. He felt that he had always had a prejudice
against motor-cars, and that the prejudice was not a prejudice because
it was well-founded.
"Darling, don't look so stern. It wasn't Carthew's fault. Another car
ran into us. I told Carthew to drive in the Park, and we went right
round the Park in about five minutes. So as I felt sure you'd be a long
time with that fat man, I had the idea of running down to Putney--to see
Sissie." Eve laughed nervously. "I thought I might possibly bring her
home with me.... After the accident Carthew put me into a taxi and I
came back. Of course he had to stay to look after the car. And then you
weren't here when I arrived! Where are you going, dearest?"
"I'm going to telephone for the doctor, of course," said Mr. Prohack
quietly, but very irritably.
"Oh, darling! I've sent for the doctor. He wasn't in, they said, but
they said he'd be back quite soon and then he'd come at once. I don't
really need the doctor. I only sent for him because I knew you'd be so
frightfully angry if I didn't."
Mr. Prohack had returned to the bed. He took his wife's hand.
"Feel my pulse. It's all right, isn't it?"
"I can't feel it at all."
"Oh, Arthur, you never could! I can feel your hand trembling, that's
what I can feel. Now please don't be upset, Arthur."
"I suppose the car's smashed?"
She nodded:
"It's a bit broken."
"Where was it?"
"It was just on the other side of Putney Bridge, on the tramlines
there."
"Carthew wasn't hurt?"
"Oh, no! Carthew was simply splendid."
"How did it happen, exactly?"
"Oh, Arthur, you with your 'exactlys'! Don't ask me. I'm too tired.
Besides, I didn't see it. My eyes were shut" She closed her eyes.
Suddenly she sat up and put her hand on his shoulder, in a sort of
appeal, vaguely smiling. He tried to smile, but could not. Then her hand
dropped. A totally bewildered expression veiled the anxious kindness in
her eyes. The blood left her face until her cheeks were nearly as white
as the embroidered cloth on the night-tabla. Her eyes closed. She fell
back. She had fainted. She was just as if dead. Her hand was as cold as
the hand of a corpse.
Such was Mr. Prohack's vast experience of life that he had not the least
idea what to do in this crisis. But he tremendously regretted that
Angmering, Bishop, and the inventor of the motor-car had ever been born.
He rushed out on to the landing and loudly shouted: "Machin! Machin!
Ring up that d----d doctor again, and if he can't come ring up Dr. Plott
at once."
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir."
He rushed back into the bedroom, discovered Eve's smelling-salts, and
held them to her nose. Already the blood was mounting again.
"Well, she's not dead, anyway!" he said to himself grimly.
He could see the blood gently mounting, mounting. It was a wonderful, a
mysterious and a reassuring sight.
"I don't care so long as she isn't injured internally," he said to
himself.
Eve opened her eyes in a dazed look. Then she grinned as if
apologetically. Then she cried copiously.
Mr. Prohack heard a car outside. It was Dr. Veiga's. The mere sound of
Dr. Veiga's car soothed Mr. Prohack, accused him of losing his head, and
made a man of him.
Dr. Veiga entered the bedroom in exactly the same style as on his first
visit to Mr. Prohack himself. He had heard the nature of the case from
Machin on his way upstairs. He listened to Mr. Prohack, who spoke, in
the most deceitful way, as if he had been through scores of such
affairs.
"Exactly," said Dr. Veiga, examining Eve summarily. "She sat up. The
blood naturally left her head, and she fainted. Fainting is nothing but
a withdrawing of blood from the head. Will you ring for that servant of
yours, please?"
"I'm positive I'm quite all right, Doctor," Eve murmured.
"Will you kindly not talk," said he. "If you're so positive you're all
right, why did you send for me? Did you walk upstairs? Then your legs
aren't broken, at least not seriously." He laughed softly.
But shortly afterwards, when Mr. Prohack, admirably dissembling his
purposes, crept with dignity out of the room, Dr. Veiga followed him,
and shut the door, leaving Machin busy within.
"I don't think that there is any internal lesion," said Dr. Veiga, with
seriousness. "But I will not yet state absolutely. She has had a very
severe shock and her nerves are considerably jarred."
"But it's nothing physical?"
"My dear sir, of course it's physical. Do you conceive the nerves are
not purely physical organs? I can't conceive them as anything but
physical organs. Can you?"
Mr. Prohack felt schoolboyish.
"It's you that she's upset about, though. Did you notice she motioned me
to give you some of the brandy she was taking? Very sweet of her, was it
not?... What are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to fetch my daughter."
"Excellent. But have something before you go. You may not know it, but
you have been using up nervous tissue, which has to be replaced."
As he was driving down to Putney in a taxi, Mr. Prohack certainly did
feel very tired. But he was not so tired as not to insist on helping the
engine of the taxi. He pushed the taxi forward with all his might all
the way to Putney. He pushed it till his arms ached, though his hands
were in his pockets. The distance to Putney had incomprehensibly
stretched to nine hundred and ninety-nine miles.
He found Sissie in the studio giving a private lesson to a middle-aged
gentleman who ought, Mr. Prohack considered, to have been thinking of
his latter end rather than of dancing. He broke up the lesson very
abruptly.
"Your mother has had a motor accident. You must come at once."
Sissie came.
"Then it must have been about here," said she, as the taxi approached
Putney Bridge on the return journey.
So it must. He certainly had not thought of the _locus_ of the accident.
He had merely pictured it, in his own mind, according to his own
frightened fancy. Yes, it must have been just about there. And yet there
was no sign of it in the roadway. Carthew must have had the wounded
Eagle removed. Mr. Prohack sat stern and silent. A wondrous woman, his
wife! Absurd, possibly, about such matters as investments; but an
angel! Her self-forgetfulness, her absorption in _him_,--staggering! The
accident was but one more proof of it. He was greatly alarmed about her,
for the doctor had answered for nothing. He seemed to have a thousand
worries. He had been worried all his life, but the worries that had
formed themselves in a trail to the inheritance were worse worries than
the old simple ones. No longer did the thought of the inheritance
brighten his mind. He somehow desired to go back to former days.
Glancing askance at Sissie, he saw that she too was stern. He resumed
the hard pushing of the taxi. It was not quite so hard as before,
because he knew that Sissie also was pushing her full share.
CHAPTER X
THE THEORY OF IDLENESS
I
Within the next seven days Mr. Prohack had reason to lose confidence in
himself as an expert in human nature. "After all," he reflected, "I must
have been a very simple-minded man to have thought that I thoroughly
understood another human being. Every human being is infinite, and will
beat your understanding in the end."
The reference of course was to his wife. Since the automobile accident
she had become another person and a more complex person. The climax, or
what seemed to be the climax, came one cold morning when she and Mr.
Prohack and Sissie and Dr. Veiga were sitting together in the little
boudoir beyond the bedroom. They were packed in there because Eve
(otherwise Marian) had taken a fancy to the sofa.
Eve was relating to the admired and trusted doctor all her peculiar
mental and moral symptoms. She was saying that she could no longer
manage the house, could not concentrate her mind on anything, could not
refrain from strange caprices, could not remain calm, could not keep her
temper, and was the worst conceivable wife for such a paragon as Arthur
Prohack. Her daughter alone had saved the household organism from a
catastrophe; her daughter Sissie--
"Come here, Sissie!"
Sissie obeyed the call and was suddenly embraced by her mother with deep
tenderness. This in front of the doctor! Still more curious was the fact
that Sissie, of late her mother's frigid critic, came forward and
responded to the embrace almost effusively. The spectacle was really
touching. It touched Mr. Prohack, who yet felt as if the floor had
yielded under his feet and he was falling into the Tube railway
underground. Indeed Mr. Prohack had never had such sensations as drew
and quartered him then.
"Well," said Dr. Veiga to Mrs. Prohack in his philosophical-realistic
manner, "I've been marking time for a week. I shall now proceed to put
you right. You can't sleep. You will sleep to-night--I shall send you
something. I suppose it isn't your fault that you've been taking the
digestive tonic I sent you last thing at night under the impression that
it was a sedative, in spite of the label. But it is regrettable. As for
your headaches, I will provide a pleasing potion. As for this sad lack
of application, don't attempt application. As for your strange caprices,
indulge them. One thing is essential. You must go away to the sea. You
must go to Frinton-on-Sea. It is an easy journey. There is a Pullman car
on the morning train, and the air is unrivalled for your--shall I
say?--idiosyncrasy."
"Yes, darling mother," said Sissie. "You must go away, and father and I
will take you."
"Of course!" confirmed Mr. Prohack, with an imitation of pettishness, as
though he had been steadily advocating a change of scene for days past;
but he had done nothing of the kind.
"Oh!" Eve cried piteously, "that's the one thing I can't do!"
Dr. Veiga laughed. "Afraid of the expense, I suppose?"
"No," Eve answered with seriousness. "My husband has just made a very
fortunate investment, which means a profit of at least a hundred
thousand pounds--like that!" She snapped her fingers and laughed
lightly.
Here was another point to puzzle an expert in human nature. Instead of
being extremely incredulous and apprehensive about the vast speculation
with Sir Paul, Eve had in truth accepted it for a gold-mine. She did not
assume satisfaction; she really was satisfied. Her satisfaction was
absurd, and nothing that Mr. Prohack could say would diminish it. She
had already begun to spend the financial results of the speculation with
enormous verve. For instance, she had hired another Eagle to take the
place of the wounded Eagle, without uttering a word to her husband of
what she had done. Mr. Prohack could see the dregs of his bank-balance;
and in a dream he had had glimpses of a sinister edifice at the bottom
of a steep slope, the building being the Bankruptcy Court.
"Is it a railway strike you're afraid of?" demanded Dr. Veiga cruelly.
And Eve replied with sweetness:
"I can't leave London until my son Charlie comes back from Glasgow, and
he's written me to say he'll be here next week."
A first-rate example, this, of her new secretiveness! She had said
absolutely nothing to Mr. Prohack about a letter from Charlie.
"When did you hear that?" Mr. Prohack might well have asked; but he was
too loyal to her to betray her secretiveness by such a question. He did
not wish the Portuguese quack to know that he, the husband, was kept in
the dark about anything whatever. He had his ridiculous dignity, had
Mr. Prohack, and all his motives were mixed motives. Not a perfectly
pure motive in the whole of his volitional existence!
However, Sissie put the question in her young blundering way. "Oh,
mother dear! You never told us!"
"I received the letter the day before yesterday," Eve continued gravely.
"And Charlie is certainly not coming home to find me away."
For two entire days she had had the important letter and had concealed
it. Mr. Prohack was disturbed.
"Very well," Dr. Veiga concurred. "It doesn't really matter whether you
go to Frinton now or next month, or even next year but one. You're a
powerful woman and you'll last a long time yet, especially if you don't
worry. I won't call for about a week, and if you'd like to consult
another doctor, do." He smiled on her in an avuncular manner, and rose.
Whereupon Mr. Prohack also jumped up.
"I'm not worrying," she protested, with a sweet, pathetic answering
smile. "Yes, I am. Yes, I am. I'm worrying because I know I'm worrying
my poor husband." She went quickly to her poor husband and kissed him
lavishly. Eve was an artist in kissing, and never a greater artist than
at that moment. And now Mr. Prohack, though still to the physical eye a
single individual, became two Mr. Prohacks. There was the Mr. Prohack
who strongly deprecated this departure from the emotional reserve which
is one of the leading and sublimest characteristics of the British
governing-class. And there was the Mr. Prohack, all nerves and heart and
humanity, who profoundly enjoyed the demonstration of a woman's
affection, disordered and against the rules though the demonstration
might be. The first Mr. Prohack blushed and hated himself for blushing.
The second was quite simply enraptured and didn't care who knew it.
"Dr. Veiga," Eve appealed, clinging to Mr. Prohack's coat. "It is my
husband who needs looking after. He is not making any progress, and it
is my fault. And let me tell you that you've been neglecting him for
me."
She was a dramatic figure of altruism, of the everlasting sacrificial
feminine. She was quite possibly absurd, but beyond doubt she was
magnificent. Mr. Prohack felt ashamed of himself, and the more ashamed
because he considered that he was in quite tolerable health.
"Mother," murmured Sissie, with a sweetness of which Mr. Prohack had
imagined her to be utterly incapable. "Come and sit down."
And Eve, guided by her daughter, the callous, home-deserting
dancing-mistress, came and sat down.
* * * * *
II
"My dear sir," said Dr. Veiga. "There is nothing at all to cause alarm.
She will gradually recover. Believe me."
He and Mr. Prohack and Sissie were conspiring together in the
dining-room, the drawing-room being at that hour and on that day under
the dominion of servants with brushes.
"But what's the matter with her? What is it?"
"Merely neurasthenia--traumatic neurasthenia."
"But what's that?" Mr. Prohack spoke low, just as though his wife could
overhear from the boudoir above and was listening to them under the
impression that they were plotting against her life.
"It's a morbid condition due to a violent shock."
"But how? You told me the other day that it was purely physical."
"Well," said Dr. Veiga. "It is, because it must be. But I assure you
that if a post-mortem were to be held on Mrs. Prohack--"
"Oh, doctor, please!" Sissie stopped him resentfully.
The doctor paused and then continued: "There would be no trace of any
morbid condition in any of the organs."
"Then how do you explain it?"
"We don't explain it," cried Dr. Veiga, suddenly throwing the onus on
the whole medical profession. "We can't. We don't know."
"It's very, very unsatisfactory, all this ignorance."
"It certainly is. But did you suppose that medical science, alone among
all sciences, had achieved finality and omniscience? We've reached the
state of knowing that we don't know, and that's something. I hope I'm
not flattering you by talking like this. I only do it to people whom I
suspect to be intelligent. But of course if you'd prefer the omniscient
bedside manner you can have it without extra charge."
Mr. Prohack thought, frightened: "I shall be making a friend of this
quack soon, if I'm not careful."
"And by the way, about _your_ health," Dr. Veiga proceeded, after
having given further assurances as to his other patient. "Mrs. Prohack
was perfectly correct. You're not making progress. The fact is, you're
bored. You haven't organised your existence, and the lack of
organisation is reacting on your health."
"Something is reacting on his health," Sissie put in. "I'm not at all
pleased." She was now not Mr. Prohack's daughter but his aunt.
"How can I organise my existence?" Mr. Prohack burst out crossly. "I
haven't got any existence to organise. I haven't got anything to do. I
thought I had too much to do, the other day. Illusion. Of course I'm
bored. I feel all right, but bored I am. And it's your fault."
"It is," the doctor admitted. "It is my fault. I took you for a person
of commonsense, and so I didn't tell you that two and two make four and
a lot more important things of the same sort. I ought to have told you.
You've taken on the new profession of being idle--it's essential for
you--but you aren't treating it seriously. You have to be a
_professionally_ idle man. Which means that you haven't got a moment to
spare. When I advised you to try idleness, I didn't mean you to be idle
idly. That's worse than useless. You've got to be idle busily. You
aren't doing half enough. Do you ever have a Turkish bath?"
"No. Never could bear the idea of them."
"Well, you will kindly take two Turkish baths a week. You can be
massaged at the same time. A Turkish bath is as good as a day's hunting,
as far as exercise goes, but you must have more exercise. Do you dance?
I see you don't. You had better begin dancing. There is no finer
exercise. I absolutely prescribe it."
At this juncture Mr. Prohack was rather relieved that the sound of an
unaccustomed voice in the hall drew his daughter out of the dining-room.
When she had gone Dr. Veiga went on, in a more confidential tone:
"There's another point. An idle man who really knows his business will
visit his tailor's, his hosier's, his bootmaker's, his barber's much
oftener and much more conscientiously than you do. You've got a mind
above clothes--of course. So have I. I take a wicked pleasure in being
picturesquely untidy. But I'm not a patient. My life is a great lark.
Yours isn't. Yours is serious. You have now a serious profession,
idleness. Bring your mind down to clothes. I say this, partly because to
be consistently well-dressed means much daily expenditure of time, and
partly because really good clothes have a distinctly curative effect on
the patient who wears them. Then again--"
Mr. Prohack was conscious of a sudden joyous uplifting of the spirit.
"Here!" said he, interrupting Dr. Veiga with a grand gesture. "Have a
cigar."
"I cannot, my friend." Dr. Veiga looked at his watch.
"You must. Have a corona." Mr. Prohack moved to the cigar cabinet which
he had recently purchased.
"No. My next patient is awaiting me in Hyde Park Gardens at this
moment."
"Let him die!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack ruthlessly. "You've got to have a
cigar with me. Look. I'll compromise. I'll make it a half-corona. You
can charge me as if for another consultation."
The doctor's foreign eyes twinkled as he sat down and struck a match.
"You thought I was a quack," he said maliciously, and maliciously he
seemed to intensify his foreign accent.
"I did," admitted Mr. Prohack with candour.
"So I am," said Dr. Veiga. "But I'm a fully qualified quack, and all
really good doctors are quacks. They have to be. They wouldn't be worth
anything if they weren't. Medicine owes a great deal to quacks."
"Tell me something about some of your cases," said Mr. Prohack
imperatively. "You're one of the most interesting men I've ever met. So
now you know. We want some of your blood transfused, into the English
character. You've got a soul above medicine as well as clothes."
"All good doctors have," said Dr. Veiga. "My life is a romance."
"And so shall mine be," said Mr. Prohack.
* * * * *
III
When at length Mr. Prohack escorted Dr. Veiga out into the hall he saw
Sissie kissing Eliza Brating with much affection on the front-door step.
They made an elegant group for a moment and then Eliza Brating departed
hurriedly, disappearing across the street behind Dr. Veiga's attendant
car.
"Now I'll just repeat once more to both of you," resumed Dr. Veiga,
embracing father and daughter in one shrewd glance. "You've nothing to
worry about upstairs." He indicated the boudoir by a movement of his
somewhat tousled head. "But you've got just a little to worry about
here." And he indicated Mr. Prohack.
"I know," said Sissie with assurance. "But I shall look after him,
doctor. You can rely on me. I understand--both cases."
"Well, there's one good thing," said Sissie, following her father into
the dining-room after the doctor had gone. "I've done with that foolish
Eliza. I knew it couldn't last and it hasn't. Unless I'm there all the
time to keep my eye on everything--of course it all goes to pieces. That
girl is the biggest noodle...!"
"But haven't I just seen you and her joined in the deepest affection?"
"Naturally I had to kiss her. But I've finished with her. And what's
more, she knows what I think of her. She never liked me."
"Sissie," said Mr. Prohack, "you shock me." And indeed he was genuinely
shocked, for he had always thought that Sissie was different from other
girls; that she had all the feminine qualities without any of the
feminine defects. Yes, he had thought that she might develop into a
creature more perfect even than Marian. And here she was talking and
behaving exactly as men at the club would relate of their own
conventional women.
Sissie gazed firmly at her father, as it were half in pity and half in
disdain. Did the innocent fellow not then understand the nature of
women? Or was he too sentimental to admit it, too romantic to be a
realist?
"Would you believe," said Sissie, "that although I was there last night
and told her exactly what to do, she's had a quarrel this morning with
the landlord of the studio? Well, she has. You know the A.R.A. on the
first floor has been making a lot of silly complaints about the
noise--music and so on--every night. And some other people have
complained. _I_ could have talked the landlord round in ten minutes!
Eliza doesn't merely not talk him round,--she quarrels with him! Of
course it's all up. And as if that wasn't enough, a County Council
inspector has been round asking about a music and dancing licence. We
shall either have to give up business altogether or else move somewhere
else. Eliza says she knows of another studio. Well, I shall write her
to-night and tell her she can have my share of the fittings and
furniture and go where she likes, but I shan't go with her. And if she
never liked me I can honestly say I never liked her. And I don't want to
run a dancing studio any more, either. Why should I, after all? We
_were_ the new poor. Now we're the new rich. Well, we may as well _be_
the new rich."
Mr. Prohack was now still more shocked. Nay, he was almost frightened.
And yet he wasn't either shocked or frightened, in the centre of his
soul. He was rather triumphant,--not about his daughter with the feet of
clay, but about himself.
"But I shan't give up teaching dancing entirely," said Sissie.
"No?" He wondered what would come next.
"No! I shall teach you."
"Indeed you won't!" He instinctively recoiled.
"Yes, I shall. I promised the doctor he could rely on me. You'll buy a
gramophone, and we'll have the carpet up in the drawing-room. Oh! You
startled deer, do you want to run back into the depths of the forest?...
Father, you are the funniest father that ever was." She marched to him
and put her hand on his shoulder and just twitched his beard. "I can
look after you quite as well as mother can. We're pals, aren't we?"
"Yes. Like the tiger and the lamb. You've got hold of my silky fleece
already."
IV
Mr. Prohack sat in the dining-room alone. The room was now heated by an
electric radiator which Eve had just bought for the sake of economy. But
her economy was the economy of the rich, for the amount of expensive
current consumed by that radiator was prodigious, while the saving it
effected in labour, cleanliness and atmospheric purity could certainly
not have been measured without a scientific instrument adapted to the
infinitely little. (Still, Machin admired and loved it.) Mr. Prohack
perceived that all four bars of it were brightly incandescent, whereas
three bars would have been ample to keep the room warm. He ought to get
up and turn a bar off.... He had a hundred preoccupations. His daughter
had classed him with the new rich. He resented the description, but
could he honestly reject it? All his recent troubles sprang from the new
riches. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would assuredly have
been at his office in the Treasury, earning an honest living, at that
very moment. For only sick persons of plenteous independent means are
ever prescribed for as he had been prescribed for; the others either go
on working and making the best of such health as is left to them, or
they die. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not have had
a car and the car would not have had an accident and he would not have
been faced with the prospect (as he was faced with it) of a legal
dispute, to be fought by him on behalf of the insurance company, with
the owner of the colliding car. (The owner of the colliding car was a
young woman as to whose veracity Carthew had had some exceedingly hard
things to say.) Mr. Prohack would have settled the matter, but neither
Eve nor the insurance company would let him settle it. And if the car
had not had an accident Eve would not have had traumatic neurasthenia,
with all its disconcerting reactions on family life. And if he had not
inherited from a profiteer, Charlie would not have gone off to
Glasgow,--he had heard odds and ends of strange tales as to Charlie's
doings in Glasgow,--not in the least reassuring! And if he had not
inherited from a profiteer Sissie would not have taken a share in a
dancing studio and might never have dangerously danced with that worm
Oswald Morfey. And if he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not
have been speculating, with a rich chance of more profiteering, in
Roumanian oil with Paul Spinner. In brief--well, he ought to get up and
turn off a bar of that wasteful radiator.
Yet he was uplifted, happy. Not because of his wealthy ease. No! A week
or two ago he had only to think of his fortune to feel uplifted and
happy. But now!
No! He was uplifted and happy now for the simple reason that he had
caught the romance of the doctor's idea of taking idleness seriously and
practising it as a profession. If circumstances forced him to be idle,
he would be idle in the grand manner. He would do everything that the
doctor had suggested, and more. (The doctor saw life like a poet. He
might be a cross between a comedian and a mountebank, but he was a great
fellow.) Every species of idleness should have its appointed hour. In
the pursuit of idleness he would become the busiest man in London. A
definite programme would be necessary. Strict routine would be
necessary. No more loafing about! He hankered after routine as the
drunkard after alcohol. Routine was what he had been missing. The
absence of routine, and naught else, was retarding his recovery. (Yes,
he knew in his heart that what they all said was true,--he was not
getting better.) His own daughter had taught him wisdom. Inevitably,
unavoidably, he was the new rich. Well, he would be the new rich
thoroughly. No other aim was logical.... Let the radiator burn!
CHAPTER XI
NEURASTHENIA CURED
I
Three days later Mr. Prohack came home late with his daughter in the
substituted car. He had accompanied Sissie to Putney for the final
disposition of the affairs of the dance-studio, and had witnessed her
blighting politeness to Eliza Brating and Eliza Brating's blighting
politeness to her. The last kiss between these two young women would
have desolated the heart of any man whose faith in human nature was less
strong than Mr. Prohack's. "I trust that the excellent Eliza is not
disfigured for life," he had observed calmly in the automobile. "What
are you talking about, father?" Sissie had exclaimed, suspicious. "I was
afraid her lips might be scorched. You feel no pain yourself, my child,
I hope?" He made the sound of a kiss. After this there was no more
conversation in the car during the journey. Arrived home, Sissie said
nonchalantly that she was going to bed.
"Burn my lips first," Mr. Prohack implored.
"Father!" said she, having kissed him. "You are simply terrible."
"I am a child," he replied. "And you are my grandmother."
"You wait till I give you your next dancing-lesson," Sissie retorted,
turning and threatening him from the stairs. "It won't be as mild as
this afternoon's."
He smiled, giving an imitation of the sphinx. He was happy enough as
mortals go. His wife was perhaps a little better. And he was gradually
launching himself into an industrious career of idleness. Also, he had
broken the ice,--the ice, that is to say, of tuition in dancing. Not a
word had been spoken abroad in the house about the first dancing-lesson.
He had had it while Mrs. Prohack was, in theory at least, paying calls;
at any rate she had set forth in the car. Mr. Prohack and Sissie had
rolled up the drawing-room carpet and moved the furniture themselves.
Mr. Prohack had unpacked the gramophone in person. They had locked the
drawing-room door. At the end of the lesson they had relaid the carpet
and replaced the furniture and enclosed the gramophone and unlocked the
door, and Mr. Prohack had issued from the drawing-room like a criminal.
The thought in his mind had been that he was no end of a dog and of a
brave dog at that. Then he sneered at himself for thinking such a
foolish thought. After all, what was there in learning to dance? But the
sneer was misplaced. His original notion that he had done something
courageous and wonderful was just a notion.
The lesson had favoured the new nascent intimacy with his daughter.
Evidently she was a born teacher as well as a born dancer. He perceived
in two minutes how marvellous her feet were. She guided him with
pressures light as a feather. She allowed herself to be guided with an
intuitive responsiveness that had to be felt to be believed. Her
exhortations were delicious, her reprimands exquisite, her patience was
infinite. Further, she said that he had what she called "natural
rhythm," and would learn easily and satisfactorily. Best of all, he had
been immediately aware of the physical benefit of the exercise. The
household was supposed to know naught of the affair, but the kitchen
knew a good deal about it somehow; the kitchen was pleasantly and rather
condescendingly excited, and a little censorious, for the reason that
nobody in the kitchen had ever before lived in a house the master of
which being a parent of adult children took surreptitious lessons in
dancing; the thing was unprecedented, and therefore of course
intrinsically reprehensible. Mr. Prohack guessed the attitude of the
kitchen, and had met Machin's respectful glance with a self-conscious
eye.
He now bolted the front-door and went upstairs extinguishing the lights
after him. Eve had told her husband and child that she should go to bed
early. He meant to have a frolicsome, teasing chat with her, for the
doctor had laid it down that light conversation would assist the cure of
traumatic neurasthenia. She would not be asleep, and even if she were
asleep she would be glad to awaken, because she admired his style of
gossip when both of them were in the vein for it. He would describe for
her the evening at the studio humorously, in such a fashion as to
confirm her in her righteous belief that the misguided Sissie had seen
the maternal wisdom and quitted dance-studios for ever.
The lamps were out in the bedroom. She slept. He switched on a light,
but her bed was empty; it had not been occupied!
"Marian!" he called in a low voice, thinking that she might be in the
boudoir.
And if she was in the boudoir she must be reclining in the dark there.
He ascertained that she was not in the boudoir. Then he visited both
the drawing-room and the dining-room. No Marian anywhere! He stood a
moment in the hall and was in a mind to ring for Machin--he could see
from a vague illumination at the entrance to the basement steps that the
kitchen was still inhabited--but just then all the servants came upwards
on the way to the attics, and at the strange spectacle of their dancing
master in the hall they all grew constrained and either coughed or
hurried as though they ought not to be caught in the act of retiring to
bed.
Mr. Prohack, as it were, threw a lasso over Machin, who was the last of
the procession.
"Where is your mistress, Machin?" He tried to be matter-of-fact, but
something unusual in his tone apparently started her.
"She's gone to bed, sir. She told me to put her hot-water bag in the bed
early."
"Oh! Thanks! Good-night."
"Good-night, sir."
He could not persuade himself to call an alarm. He could not even inform
Machin that she was mistaken, for to do so would have been equivalent to
calling an alarm. Hesitating and inactive he allowed the black-and-white
damsels and the blue cook to disappear. Nor would he disturb
Sissie--yet. He had first to get used to the singular idea that his wife
had vanished from home. Could this vanishing be one of the effects of
traumatic neurasthenia? He hurried about and searched all the rooms
again, looking with absurd carefulness, as if his wife were an
insignificant object that might have dropped unperceived under a chair
or behind a couch.
Then he telephoned to her sister, enquiring in a voice of studied
casualness. Eve was not at her sister's. He had known all the while that
she would not be at her sister's. Being unable to recall the number, he
had had to consult the telephone book. His instinct now was to fetch
Sissie, whose commonsense had of late impressed him more and more; but
he repressed the instinct, holding that he ought to be able to manage
the affair alone. He could scarcely say to his daughter: "Your mother
has vanished. What am I to do?" Moreover, feeling himself to be the
guardian of Marian's reputation for perfect sanity, he desired not to
divulge her disappearance, unless obliged to do so. She might return at
any moment. She must return very soon. It was inconceivable that
anything should have "happened" in the Prohack family....
Almost against his will he looked up "Police Stations" in the
telephone-book. There were scores of police stations. The nearest seemed
to be that of Mayfair. He demanded the number. To demand the number of
the police station was like jumping into bottomless cold water. In a
detestable dream he gave his name and address and asked if the police
had any news of a street accident. Yes, several. He described his wife.
He said, reflecting wildly, that she was not very tall and rather plump;
dark hair. Dress? Dark blue. Hat and mantle? He could not say. Age? A
queer impulse here. He knew that she hated the mention of her real age,
and so he said thirty-nine. No! The police had no news of such a person.
But the polite firm voice on the wire said that it would telephone to
other stations and would let Mr. Prohack hear immediately if there was
anything to communicate. Wonderful organisation, the London police
force!
As he hung up the receiver he realised what had occurred and what he had
done. Marian had mysteriously disappeared and he had informed the
police,--he, Arthur Prohack, C.B. What an awful event!
His mind ran on the consequences of traumatic neurasthenia. He put on
his hat and overcoat and unbolted the front-door as silently as he
could--for he still did not want anybody in the house to know the
secret--and went out into the street. What to do? A ridiculous move! Did
he expect to find her lying in the gutter? He walked to the end of the
dark street and peered into the cross-street, and returned. He had left
the front-door open. As he re-entered the house he descried in a corner
of the hall, a screwed-up telegraph-envelope. Why had he not noticed it
before? He snatched at it. It was addressed to "Mrs. Prohack."
Mr. Prohack's soul was instantaneously bathed in heavenly solace.
Traumatic neurasthenia had nothing to do with Eve's disappearance! His
bliss was intensified by the fact that he had said not a word to the
servants and had not called Sissie. And it was somewhat impaired by the
other fact that he had been ass enough to tell the police. He was just
puzzling his head to think what misfortune could have called his wife
away--not that the prospect of any misfortune much troubled him now that
Eve's vanishing was explained--when through the doorway he saw a taxi
drive up. Eve emerged from the taxi.
II
He might have gone out and paid the fare for her, but he stayed where he
was, in the doorway, thinking with beatific relief that after all
nothing had "happened" in the family.
"Ah!" he said, in the most ordinary, complacent, quite undisturbed
tone, "I was just beginning to wonder where you'd got to. We've been
back about five minutes, Sissie and I, and Sissie's gone to bed. I
really don't believe she knows you were out."
Mrs. Prohack came urgently towards him, pushing the door to behind her
with a careless loud bang. The bang might waken the entire household,
but Mrs. Prohack did not care. Mrs. Prohack kissed him without a word.
He possessed in his heart a barometric scale of her kisses, and this was
a set-fair kiss, a kiss with a somewhat violent beginning and a
reluctant close. Then she held her cheek for him to kiss. Both cheek and
lips were freshly cold from the night air. Mr. Prohack was aware of an
immense, romantic felicity. And he immediately became flippant, not
aloud, but secretly, to hide himself from himself.
He thought:
"It's a positive fact that I've been kissing this girl of a woman for a
quarter of a century, and she's fat."
But beneath his flippancy and beneath his felicity there was a
lancinating qualm, which, if he had expressed it he would have expressed
thus:
"If anything _did_ happen to her, it would be the absolute ruin of me."
The truth was that his felicity frightened him. Never before had he been
seriously concerned for her well-being. The reaction from grave alarm
lighted up the interior of his mysterious soul with a revealing flash of
unique intensity.
"What are all these lights burning for?" she murmured. Lights were
indeed burning everywhere. He had been in a mood to turn on but not to
turn off.
"Oh!" he said, "I was just wandering about."
"I'll go straight upstairs," she said, trying to be as matter-of-fact as
her Arthur appeared to be.
When he had leisurely set the whole of the ground-floor to rights, he
followed her. She was waiting for him in the boudoir. She had removed
her hat and mantle, and lighted one of the new radiators, and was
sitting on the sofa.
"There came a telegram from Charlie," she began. "I was crossing the
hall just as the boy reached the door. So I opened the door myself. It
was from Charlie to say that he would be at the Grand Babylon Hotel
to-night."
"Charlie! The Grand Babylon!... Not Buckingham Palace." Eve ignored his
crude jocularity.
"It seems I ought to have received it early in the afternoon. I was so
puzzled I didn't know what to do--I just put my things on and went off
to the hotel at once. It wasn't till after I was in the taxi that I
remembered I ought to have told the servants where I was going. That's
why I hurried back. I wanted to get back before you did. Charlie
suggested telephoning from the hotel, but I wouldn't let him on any
account."
"Why not?"
"Well, I thought you might be upset and wonder what on earth was going
on."
"What was going on?" Mr. Prohack repeated, gazing at her childlike
maternal serious face, whose wistfulness affected him in an
extraordinary way. "What on earth are you insinuating?"
No! It was inconceivable that this pulsating girl perched on the sofa
should be the mother of the mature and independent Charles.
"Charlie's _staying_ at the Grand Babylon Hotel," said Eve, as though
she were saying that Charlie had forged a cheque or blown up the
Cenotaph.
Even the imperturbable man of the world in front of her momentarily
blenched at the news.
"More fool him!" observed Mr. Prohack.
"Yes, and he's got a bedroom and a private sitting-room and a bathroom,
and a room for a secretary--"
"Hence a secretary," Mr. Prohack put in.
"Yes, and a secretary. And he dictates things to the secretary all the
time, and the telephone's always going,--yes, even at this time of
night. He must be spending enormous sums. So of course I hurried back to
tell you."
"You did quite right, my pet," said Mr. Prohack. "A good wife should
share these tit-bits with her husband at the earliest possible moment."
He was really very like what in his more conventional moments he would
have said a woman was like. If Eve had taken the affair lightly he would
without doubt have remonstrated, explaining that such an affair ought by
no means to be taken lightly. But seeing that she took it very
seriously, his instinct was to laugh at it, though in fact he was
himself extremely perturbed by this piece of news, which confirmed, a
hundredfold and in the most startling manner, certain sinister
impressions of his own concerning Charlie's deeds in Glasgow. And he
assumed the gay attitude, not from a desire to reassure his wife, but
from mere contrariness. Positively the strangest husband that ever
lived, and entirely different from normal husbands!
Then he saw tears hanging in Eve's eyes,--tears not of resentment
against his lack of sympathy, tears of bewilderment and perplexity. She
simply did not understand his attitude. And he sat down close by her on
the sofa and solaced her with three kisses. She was singularly
attractive in her alternations of sagacity and helplessness.
"But it's awful," she whimpered. "The boy must be throwing money away at
the rate of twenty or twenty-five pounds a day."
"Very probably," Mr. Prohack agreed.
"Where's he getting it from?" she demanded. "He must be getting it from
somewhere."
"I expect he's made it. He's rather clever, you know."
"But he can't have made money like that."
"People do, sometimes."
"Not honestly,--you know what I mean, Arthur!" This was an earthquaking
phrase to come from a mother's lips.
"And yet," said Mr. Prohack, "everything Charlie did used to be right
for you."
"But he's carrying on just like an adventurer! I've read in reports of
trials about people carrying on just like that. A fortnight ago he
hadn't got fifty pounds cash in the world, and now he's living like a
millionaire at the Grand Babylon Hotel! Arthur, what are you going to do
about it? Couldn't you go and see him; to-night?"
"Now listen to me," Mr. Prohack began in a new tone, taking her hands.
"Supposing I did go and see him to-night, what could I say to him?"
"Well, you're his father."
"And you're his mother. What did _you_ say to him?"
"Oh! I didn't say anything. I only said I should have been very glad if
he could have arranged to sleep at home as usual, and he said he was
sorry he couldn't because he was so busy."
"You didn't tell him he was carrying on like an adventurer?"
"Arthur! How could I?"
"But you'd like _me_ to tell him something of the sort. All that I can
say, you could say--and that is, enquire in a friendly way what he has
done, is doing, and hopes to do."
"But--"
"Yes, my innocent creature. You may well pause." He caressed her, and
she tried to continue in unhappiness, but could not. "You pause because
there is nothing to say."
"You're his father at any rate," she burst out triumphantly.
"That's not his fault. You ought to have thought of all this over twenty
years ago, before Charlie was born, before we were married, before you
met me. To become a parent is to accept terrible risks. I'm Charlie's
father. What then? Am I to give him orders as to what he must do and
what he mustn't? This isn't China and it isn't the eighteenth century.
He owes nothing whatever to me, or to you. If we were starving and he
had plenty, he would probably consider it his duty to look after us; but
that's the limit of what he owes us. Whereas nothing can put an end to
our responsibility towards him. You see, we brought him here. We thought
it would be so nice to have children, and so Charlie arrived. He didn't
choose his time, and he didn't choose his character, nor his education,
nor his chance. If he had his choice you may depend he'd have chosen
differently. Do you want me, on the top of all that, to tell him that he
must obediently accept something else from us--our code of conduct? It
would be mere cheek, and with all my shortcomings I'm incapable of
impudence, especially to the young. He was our slave for nearly twenty
years. We did what we liked with him; and if Charlie fails now it simply
means that we've failed. Besides, how can you be sure that he's carrying
on like an adventurer? He may be carrying on like a financial genius.
Perhaps we have brought a giant to earth. We can't believe it of course,
because we haven't got enough faith in ourselves, but later on we may be
compelled to believe it. Naturally if Charlie crashes after a showy
flight, then he won't be a financial genius,--he'll only be an
adventurer, and there may he some slight trouble in the law
courts,--there usually is. That is where we shall have to come forward
and pay for the nice feeling of having children. And, remember, we
shan't be in a position to upbraid Charlie. He could silence us with one
question, to which we could find no answer: 'Why did you get married,
you two?' However, my pet, let us hope for the best. It's not yet a
crime to live at great price at the Grand Babylon Hotel. Quite possibly
your son has not yet committed any crime, whatever. If he succeeds in
making a huge fortune and in keeping it, he will not commit any crime.
Rich men never do. They can't. They never even commit murder. There is
no reason why they should. Whatever they do, it is no worse than an
idiosyncrasy. Now tell me what our son talked about."
"Well, he didn't talk much. He--he wasn't expecting me."
"Did he ask after me?"
"I told him about you. He asked about the car."
"He didn't ask after me, but he asked after the car. Nothing very
original there, is there? Any son would behave like that. He must do
better than that if he doesn't mean to end as an adventurer. I must go
and see him, and offer him, very respectfully, some advice."
"Arthur, I insist that he shall come here. It is not proper that you
should go running after _him_."
"Pooh, my dear! I'm rich enough myself to run after him without being
accused of snobbishness or lion-hunting or anything of that kind."
"Oh! Arthur!" sobbed Eve. "Don't you think you're been funny quite long
enough?" She then openly wept.
The singular Mr. Prohack was apparently not in the least moved by his
wife's tears. He and she alone in the house were out of bed; there was
no chance of their being disturbed. He did not worry about his
adventurous son. He did not worry about the possibility of Oswald Morfey
having a design to convert his daughter into Mrs. Oswald Morfey. He did
not worry about the fate of the speculation in which he had joined Sir
Paul Spinner. Nor did he worry about the malady called traumatic
neurasthenia. As for himself he fancied that he had not for years felt
better than he felt at that moment. He was aware of the most delicious
sensation of sharing a perfect nocturnal solitude with his wife. He drew
her towards him until her acquiescent head lay against his waistcoat. He
held her body in his arms, and came deliberately to the conclusion that
to be alive was excellent.
Eve's body was as yielding as that of a young girl. To Mr. Prohack, who
of course was the dupe of an illusion, it had an absolutely enchanting
girlishness. She sobbed and she sobbed, and Mr. Prohack let her sob. He
loosed the grip of his arms a little, so that her face, free of his
waistcoat, was turned upwards in the direction of the ceiling; and then
he very caressingly wiped her eyes with his own handkerchief. He gave an
elaborate care to the wiping of her eyes. For some minutes it was a
Sisyphean labour, for what he did she immediately undid; but after a
time the sobs grew less frequent, and at length they ceased; only her
lips trembled at intervals.
Mr. Prohack said ingratiatingly:
"And whose fault is it if I'm funny? Answer, you witch."
"I don't know," Eve murmured tremblingly and not quite articulately.
"It's your fault. Do you know that you gave me the fright of my life
to-night, going out without saying where you were going to? Do you know
that you put me into such a state that I've been telephoning to
police-stations to find out whether there'd been any street accidents
happening to a woman of your description? I was so upset that I daren't
even go upstairs and call Sissie."
"You said you'd only been back five minutes when I came," Eve observed
in a somewhat firmer voice.
"I did," said Mr. Prohack. "But that was neither more nor less than a
downright lie. You see I was in such a state that I had to pretend, to
both you and myself, that things aren't what they are.... And then,
without the slightest warning, you suddenly arrive without a scratch on
you. You aren't hurt. You aren't even dead. It's a scandalous shame that
a woman should be able, by merely arriving in a taxi, to put a sensible
man into such a paroxysm of satisfaction as you put me into a while ago.
It's not right. It's not fair. Then you try to depress me with bluggy
stories of your son's horrible opulence, and when you discover you can't
depress me you burst into tears and accuse me of being funny. What did
you expect me to be? Did you expect me to groan because you aren't lying
dead in a mortuary? If I'm funny, you are at liberty to attribute it to
hysteria, the hysteria of joy. But I wish you to understand that these
extreme revulsions of feeling which you impose on me are very dangerous
for a plain man who is undergoing a rest-cure."
Eve raised her arms about Mr. Prohack's neck, lifted herself up by them,
and silently kissed him. Then she sank back to her former position.
"I've been a great trial to you lately, haven't I?" she breathed.
"Not more so than usual," he answered. "You know you always abuse your
power."
"But I _have_ been queer?"
"Well," judicially, "perhaps you have. Perhaps five per cent or so above
your average of queerness."
"Didn't the doctor say what I'd got was traumatic neurasthenia?"
"That or something equally absurd."
"Well, I haven't got it any more. I'm cured. You'll see."
Just then the dining-room clock entered upon its lengthy business of
chiming the hour of midnight. And as it faintly chimed Mr. Prohack,
supporting his wife, had a surpassing conviction of the beauty of
existence and in particular of his own good fortune--though the matter
of his inheritance never once entered his mind. He gazed down at Eve's
ingenuous features, and saw in them the fastidious fineness which had
caused her to recoil so sensitively from her son's display at the Grand
Babylon. Yes, women had a spiritual beauty to which men could not
pretend.
"Arthur," said she, "I never told you that you'd forgotten to wind up
that clock on Sunday night. It stopped this evening while you were out,
and I had to wind it and I only guessed what the time was."
CHAPTER XII
THE PRACTICE OF IDLENESS
I
At ten minutes to eleven the next morning Mr. Prohack rushed across the
pavement, and sprang head-first into the original Eagle (now duly
repaired) with the velocity and agility of a man long accustomed to the
fact that seconds are more precious than six-pences and minutes than
banknotes. And Carthew slammed the door on him like a conjuror
performing the final act of a trick before an audience of three thousand
people.
Mr. Prohack was late. He was late on this the first full day of his
career as a consciously and scientifically idle man. Carthew knew that
his employer was late; and certainly the people in his house knew that
he was late. Mr. Prohack's breakfast in bed had been late, which meant
that his digestive and reposeful hour of newspaper reading was thrown
forward. And then he had actually been kept out of his own bathroom,
through the joint fault of Sissie and her mother, who had apparently
determined to celebrate Sissie's definite release from the dance-studio,
and Mrs. Prohack's astonishing recovery from traumatic neurasthenia, by
a thorough visitation and reorganisation of the house and household.
Those two, re-established in each other's affection, had been holding an
inquisition in the bathroom, of all rooms, at the very moment when Mr.
Prohack needed the same, with the consequence that he found the bath
empty instead of full, and the geyser not even lighted. Yet they well
knew that he had a highly important appointment at the tailor's at ten
forty-five, followed by other just as highly important appointments! The
worst of it was that he could not take their crime seriously because he
was on such intimate and conspiratorial terms with each of them
separately. On the previous evening he had exchanged wonderful and
rather dangerous confidences with his daughter, and, further on in the
night he and her mother had decided that the latter's fantastic
excursion to the Grand Babylon Hotel should remain a secret. And Sissie,
as much as her mother, had taken advantage of his helplessness in the
usual unscrupulous feminine manner. They went so far as to smile
quasi-maternally at his boyish busy-ness.
Now no sooner had Carthew slammed the door of the Eagle and got into the
driving-seat than a young woman, a perfect stranger to Mr. Prohack,
appeared, and through the open window asked in a piteous childlike voice
if Mr. Prohack was indeed Mr. Prohack, and, having been informed that
this was so, expressed the desire to speak with him. Mr. Prohack was
beside himself with annoyance and thwarted energy. Was the entire
universe uniting against the execution of his programme?
"I have a most important appointment," said he, raising his hat and
achieving politeness by an enormous effort, "and if your business is
urgent you'd better get into the car. I'm going to Conduit Street."
She slipped into the car like a snake, and Carthew, beautifully unaware
that he had two passengers, simultaneously drove off.
If a snake, she was a very slim, blushing and confused snake,--short,
too, for a python. And she had a turned-up nose, and was quite young.
Her scales were stylish. And, although certainly abashed, apprehensive
and timorous, she yet had, about her delicate mouth, the signs of
terrible determination, of ruthlessness, of an ambition that nothing
could thwart. Mr. Prohack might have been alarmed, but fortunately he
was getting used to driving in closed cars with young women, and so
could keep his nerve. Moreover, he enjoyed these experiences, being a
man of simple tastes and not too analytical of good fortune when it came
his way.
"It's very good of you to see me like this," said the girl, in the voice
of a rapid brook with a pebbly bed. "My name is Winstock, and I've
called about the car."
"The car? What car?"
"The motor-car accident at Putney, you know."
"Ah!"
"Yes."
"Just so. Just so. You are the owner-driver of the other car."
"Yes."
"I think you ought to have seen my wife. It is really she who is the
owner of this car. As you are aware, I wasn't in the accident myself,
and I don't know anything about it. Besides, it's entirely in the hands
of the insurance company and the solicitors. You are employing a
solicitor, aren't you?"
"Oh, yes."
"Then I suppose it's by his advice that you've come to see me."
"Well, I'm afraid it isn't."
"What!" cried Mr. Prohack. "If it isn't by his advice you may well be
afraid. Do you know you've done a most improper thing? Most improper. I
can't possibly listen to you. _You_ may go behind your lawyer's back.
But I can't. And also there's the insurance company." Mr. Prohack lifted
the rug which had fallen away from her short skirts.
"I think solicitors and companies and things are so silly," said Miss
Winstock, whose eyes had not moved from the floor-mat. "Thank you." The
'thank you' was in respect to the rug.
"So they are," Mr. Prohack agreed.
"That was why I thought it would be better to come straight to you." For
the first time she glanced at him; a baffling glance, a glance that
somehow had the effect of transferring some of the apprehension in her
own breast to that of Mr. Prohack.
"Well," said he, in a departmental tone recalling Whitehall. "Will you
kindly say what you have to say?"
"Can I speak confidentially?"
Mr. Prohack raised his hands and laughed in what he hoped was a sardonic
manner.
"I give you young women up," he murmured. "Yes, I give you up. You're my
enemy. We're at law. And you want to talk confidentially! How can I tell
whether I can let you talk confidentially until I've heard what you're
going to say?"
"Oh! I was only going to say that I'm not really the owner-driver of the
car. I'm personal secretary to Mr. Carrel Quire, and it's really his
car. You see he has three cars, but as there's been such a fuss about
waste lately and he's so prominent in the anti-squandermania campaign,
he prefers to keep only one car in his own name."
"You don't mean to sit there and tell me you're talking about the
Secretary for Foreign Affairs!"
"Yes, of course. Who else? You know he's on the continent at present. He
wouldn't take me with him because he wanted to create an effect of
austerity in Paris--that's what he said; and I must get this accident
affair settled up before he comes back, or he _may_ dismiss me. I don't
think he will, because I'm a cousin of the late Lady Queenie
Paulle--that's how I got the place--but he may. And then where should I
be? I was told you were so kind and nice--that's why I came."
"I am not kind and I am not nice," remarked Mr. Prohack, in an acid
tone, but laughing to himself because the celebrated young statesman,
Mr. Carrel Quire (bald at thirty-five) was precisely one of the
ministers who, during the war, had defied and trampled upon the
Treasury. He now almost demoniacally contemplated the ruin of Mr. Carrel
Quire.
"You have made a serious mistake in coming to me. Unfortunately you
cannot undo it. Be good enough to understand that you have not been
talking confidentially."
Miss Winstock ought to have been intimidated and paralysed by the
menacing manner of the former Terror of the Departments. But she was
not.
"Please, please, Mr. Prohack," she said calmly, "don't talk in that
strain. I distinctly told you I was talking confidentially, and I'm sure
I can rely on you--unless all that I've heard about you is untrue; which
it can't be. I only want matters to be settled quietly, and when Mr.
Quire returns he will pay anything that has to be paid--if it isn't too
much."
"My chauffeur asserts that you have told a most naughty untruth about
the accident. You say that he ran into you, whereas the fact is that he
was nearly standing still while you were going too fast and you skidded
badly into him off the tramlines. And he's found witnesses to prove what
he says."
"I may have been a little mistaken," Miss Winstock admitted with light
sadness. "I won't say I wasn't. You know how you are in an accident."
"I've never been in an accident in my life," Mr. Prohack objected.
"If you had, you'd sympathise with me."
At this moment the Eagle drew up at the desired destination in Conduit
Street. Mr. Prohack looked at his watch.
"I'm sorry to seem inhospitable," he said, "but my appointment is
extremely important. I cannot wait."
"Can _I_ wait?" Miss Winstock suggested. "I'm quite used to waiting for
Mr. Carrel Quire. If I might wait in the car till you came out.... You
see I want to come to an understanding."
"I don't know how long I shall be."
"That doesn't matter, truly. I haven't got anything else in the world to
do, as Mr. Carrel Quire is away."
Mr. Prohack left Miss Winstock in the car.
The establishment into which Mr. Prohack disappeared was that of his
son's tailors. He slipped into it with awe, not wholly because the
tailors were his son's tailors, but in part because they were tailors to
various august or once-august personages throughout Europe. Till that
day Mr. Prohack had bought his clothes from an insignificant though
traditional tailor in Maddox Street, to whom he had been taken as a boy
by his own father. And he had ordered his clothes hastily, negligently,
anyhow, in intervals snatched from meal-hours or on the way from one
more important appointment to another more important appointment. Indeed
he had thought no more of ordering a suit than of ordering a whiskey and
soda. Nay, he had on one occasion fallen incredibly low, and his memory
held the horrid secret for ever,--on one occasion he had actually bought
a ready-made suit. It had fitted him, for he was slimmish and of a good
stock size, but he had told nobody, not even his wife, of this shocking
defection from the code of true British gentlemanliness,--and he had
never repeated the crime; the secret would die with him. And now he was
devoting the top of the morning to the commandment of a suit. The affair
was his chief business, and he had come to it in a great car whose six
cylinders were working harmoniously for nothing else, and with the aid
of an intelligent and experienced and expert human being whose sole
object in life that morning was to preside over Mr. Prohack's locomotion
to and from the tailors'!
Mr. Prohack perceived that he was only beginning to comprehend the
wonder of existence. The adepts at the tailors', however, seemed to see
nothing wonderful in the matter. They showed no surprise that he had
written to make an appointment with a particular adept named
Melchizidek, who had been casually mentioned weeks earlier by Charles as
the one man in London who really comprehended waistcoats. They took it
as a matter of course that Mr. Prohack had naught else to do with the
top of the morning but order clothes, and that while he did so he should
keep a mature man and a vast and elaborate machine waiting for him in
the street outside. And Mr. Melchizidek's manner alone convinced Mr.
Prohack that what he had told his family, and that what he had told Miss
Winstock in the car, was strictly true and not the invention of his
fancy--namely that the appointment was genuinely of high importance.
Mr. Melchizidek possessed the strange gift of condescending majestically
to Mr. Prohack while licking his boots. He listened to Mr. Prohack as to
an autocrat while giving Mr. Prohack to understand that Mr. Prohack knew
not the first elements of sartorial elegance. At intervals he gazed
abstractedly at the gold framed and crowned portraits that hung on the
walls and at the inscriptions similarly framed and crowned and hung, and
it was home in upon Mr. Prohack that the inscriptions in actual practice
referred to Mr. Melchizidek, and that this same Melchizidek, fawning
and masterful, had seen monarchs in their shirt sleeves and spoken to
princes with pins in his mouth, and made marks in white chalk between
the shoulder-blades of grand-dukes; and that revolutions and cataclysms
were nothing to Mr. Melchizidek.
When Mr. Melchizidek had decided by hypnotic suggestion and magic power
what Mr. Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr.
Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them
carrying pencil and paper, and Mr. Prohack removed, with assistance, his
shabby coat and his waistcoat, and Mr. Melchizidek measured him in
unexampled detail and precision, and the scribe, writing, intoned aloud
all Mr. Prohack's dimensions. And all the time Mr. Prohack was asking in
his heart: "How much will these clothes cost?" And he, once the Terror
of the departments, who would have held up the war to satisfy his
official inquisitiveness on a question of price,--he dared not ask how
much the clothes would cost. He felt that in that unique establishment
money was simply not mentioned,--it could never be more than the subject
of formal and stately correspondence.
During the latter part of the operation Mr. Prohack heard, outside in
the shop, the sharp sounds of an imperial and decisive voice, and he was
thereby well-nigh thunderstruck. And even Mr. Melchizidek seemed to be
similarly affected by the voice,--so much so that the intimate of
sovereigns unaffectedly hastened the business of enduing Mr. Prohack
into the shameful waistcoat and coat, and then, with a gesture of
apology, passed out of the cubicle, leaving Mr. Prohack with the
attendant scribe.
Mr. Prohack, pricked by a fearful curiosity, followed Mr. Melchizidek;
and the voice was saying:
"Oh! You're there, Melchizidek. Just come and look at this crease."
Mr. Melchizidek, pained, moved forward. Three acolytes were already
standing in shocked silence round about a young man who stretched forth
one leg so that all might see.
"I ask you," the young man proceeded, "is it an inch out or isn't it?
And how many times have I tried these things on? I'm a busy man, and
here I have to waste my time coming here again and again to get a thing
right that ought to have been right the first time. And you call
yourselves the first tailors in Europe.... Correct me if I'm inaccurate
in any of my statements."
Mr. Melchizidek, who unlike an Englishman knew when he was beaten, said
in a solemn bass:
"When can I send for them, sir?"
"You can send for them this afternoon at the Grand Babylon, and be sure
that I have them back to-morrow night."
"Certainly, sir. It's only fair to ourselves, sir, to state that we have
a great deal of trouble with our workmen in these days."
"No doubt. And I have a great deal of trouble to find cash in these
days, but I don't pay your bills with bad money, I think."
A discreet sycophantic smile from the group at this devastating
witticism!
Mr. Prohack cautiously approached; the moment had awkwardness, but Mr.
Prohack owed it to himself to behave with all presence of mind.
"Hullo, Charlie!" said he casually.
"Hello, dad! How are you?" And Charlie, wearing the very suit in which
he had left home for Glasgow, shook hands boyishly.
Looking into his firm, confident eyes, Mr. Prohack realised, perhaps for
the first time, that the fruit of his loins was no common boy. The mere
fact that as an out-of-work ex-officer, precariously making a bit in
motor-bicycle deals, he had dared to go to Melchizidek's firm for
clothes, and that he was now daring to affront Melchizidek,--this sole
fact separated him from the ruck of sons.
"I warn you, dad, that if you're ordering clothes here you're ordering
trouble."
Mr. Melchizidek's interjected remarks fitted to the occasion. The group
dissipated. The males of the Prohack family could say nothing
interesting to each other in such a situation. They could only pretend
that their relations were purely normal; which they did quite well.
"I say, dad, I'm awfully busy this morning. I can't stop now. I've
telephoned the mater and she's coming to the Grand Babylon for
lunch--one thirty. Sis too, I think. Do come. You haven't got anything
else to do." The boy murmured all this.
"Oh! Haven't I! I'm just as busy as you are, and more."
However, Mr. Prohack accepted the invitation. Charlie went off in haste.
Mr. Prohack arrived on the pavement in time to see him departing in an
open semi-racing car driven by a mature, handsome and elegant woman,
with a chauffeur sitting behind. Mr. Prohack's mind was one immense
interrogation concerning his son. He had seen him, spoken with him,
and--owing to the peculiar circumstances--learnt nothing whatever.
Indeed, the mystery of Charlie was deepened. Had Charles hurried away in
order to hide the mature handsome lady from his father?... Mr. Prohack
might have moralised, but he suddenly remembered that he had a lady in
his own car, and that the disparity between their ages was no less than
the disparity between the ages of the occupants of the car in which
Charles had fled.
III
Turning to his own car, he observed with a momentary astonishment that
Carthew, the chauffeur, leaning a little nonchalantly through the open
off-window of the vehicle, was engaged in conversation with Miss
Winstock. The astonishment passed when he reflected that as these two
had been in the enforced intimacy of an accident together they were
necessarily on some kind of speaking terms. Before Carthew had noticed
Mr. Prohack, Mr. Prohack noticed that Carthew's attitude to Miss
Winstock showed a certain tolerant condescension, while Miss Winstock's
girlish gestures were of a subtly appealing nature. Then in an instant
Carthew, the easy male tolerator of inaccurate but charming young women,
disappeared from the window--disappeared indeed, entirely from the face
of the earth--and a perfectly non-human, impassive automaton emerged
from behind the back of the car and stood attentive at the door, holding
the handle thereof. Mr. Prohack, with a gift of dissimulation equal to
Carthew's own, gave him an address in Bond Street.
"I have another very urgent appointment," said Mr. Prohack to Miss
Winstock as he sat down beside her. And he took his diary from his
pocket and gazed at it intently, frowning, though there was nothing
whatever on its page except the printed information that the previous
Sunday was the twenty-fourth after Trinity, and a warning: "If you have
omitted to order your new diary it would be well to do so NOW to prevent
disappointment."
"It's awfully good of you to have me here," said Miss Winstock.
"It is," Mr. Prohack admitted. "And so far as I can see you've done
nothing to deserve it. You were very wrong to get chatting with my
chauffeur, for example."
"I felt that all the time. But he has such a powerful individuality."
"He may have. But what I pay him for is to drive my car, not to put his
passengers into a semi-hypnotic state. Do you know why I am taking you
about like this?"
"I hope it's because you are kind-hearted."
"Not at all. Do you think I should do it if you were fifty, fat and a
fright? Of course I shouldn't. And no one knows that better than you.
I'm doing it because you're young and charming and slim and attractive
and smart. Though forty-six, I am still a man. The chief difference
between me and most other men is that I know and openly admit my
motives. That's what makes me so dangerous. You should beware of me.
Take note that I haven't asked you what you're been saying to Carthew.
Nor shall I ask him. Now what exactly do you want me to do?"
"Only not to let the law case about the accident go any further."
"And are you in a position to pay the insurance company for the damage
to my car?"
"Oh! Mr. Carrel Quire will pay."
"Are you sure? Are you quite sure that Mr. Carrel Quire is not spending
twice as much as his ministerial salary, that salary being the whole of
his financial resources except loans from millionaires who will accept
influence instead of interest? I won't enquire whether Mr. Carrel Quire
pays your salary regularly. If he does, it furnishes the only instance
of regularity in the whole of his gorgeous career. If our little affair
becomes public it might ruin Mr. Carrel Quire as a politician--at the
least it would set him back for ten years. And I am particularly anxious
to ruin Mr. Carrel Quire. In doing so I shall accomplish a patriotic
act."
"Oh, Mr. Prohack!"
"Yes. Mr. Carrel Quire may be--probably is--a delightful fellow, but he
is too full of brains, and he constitutes the gravest danger that has
threatened the British Empire for a hundred years. Hence it is my duty
to ruin him if I get the chance; and I've got the chance. I don't see
how he could survive the exposure of the simple fact that while
preaching anti-waste he is keeping motor-cars in the names of young
women."
The car had stopped in front of a shop over whose door a pair of gilded
animals like nothing in zoology were leaping amiably at each other. Miss
Winstock began to search neurotically in a bag for a handkerchief.
"This is the scene of my next appointment," Mr. Prohack continued.
"Would you prefer to leave me at once or will you wait again?"
Miss Winstock hesitated.
"You had better wait," Mr. Prohack decided. "You'll be crying in fifteen
seconds and your handkerchief is sadly inadequate to the crisis. Try a
little self-control, and don't let Carthew hypnotise you. I shan't be
surprised if you're gone when I come back."
A commissionaire was now holding open the door of the car.
"Carthew," said Mr. Prohack privily, after he had got out. "Oblige me
by imagining that during my absence the car is empty."
Carthew quivered for a fraction of eternity, but was exceedingly quick
to recover.
"Yes, sir."
The shop was all waxed parquetry, silks, satins, pure linen and pure
wool, diversified by a few walking-sticks and a cuff link or so. Faced
by a judge-like middle-aged authority in a frock-coat, Mr. Prohack
suddenly lost the magisterial demeanour which he had exhibited to a
defenceless girl in the car. He comprehended in a flash that suits of
clothes were a detail in the existence of an idle man and that neckties
and similar supremacies alone mattered.
"I want a necktie," he began gently.
"Certainly, sir," said the judge. But the judge's eyes, fixed on Mr.
Prohack's neck, said: "I should just think you did."
Life was enlarged to a bewildering, a maddening maze of neckties. Mr.
Prohack considered in his heart that one of the needs of the day was an
encyclopaedia of neckties. As he bought neckties he felt as foolish as a
woman buying cigars. Any idiot could buy a suit, but neckties baffled
the intelligence of the Terror of the departments, though he had worn
something in the nature of a necktie for forty years. The neckties which
he bought inspired him with fear--the fear lest he might lack the
courage to wear them. In a nightmare he saw himself putting them on in
his bedroom and proceeding downstairs to breakfast, and then,
panic-stricken, rushing back to the bedroom to change into one of his
old neckties.
And when he had bought neckties he apprehended that neckties without
shirts were like butter without bread, and he bought shirts. And then he
surmised that shirts without collars would be indecent. And when he had
bought collars a still small voice told him that the logical foundation
of all things was socks, and that really he had been trying to build a
house from the fourth story downwards. Fortunately he had less
hesitation about the socks, for he could comfort himself with the
thought that socks did not jump to the eye as neckties did, and that by
constant care their violence might even be forever concealed from the
gaze of his household. He sighed with relief at the end of the sock
episode. But he had forgotten braces, as to which he surrendered
unconditionally to the frock-coated judge. He brooked the most
astounding braces, for none but Eve would see them, and he could
intimidate Eve.
"Shall we make you a quarter of a dozen pairs to measure, sir?"
This extraordinary question miraculously restored all Mr. Prohack's
vanished aplomb. That at the end of the greatest war in the history of
the earth, amid decapitated empires and cities of starvation, braces
should be made to measure,--this was too much for Mr. Prohack, who had
not dreamed that braces ever had been made to measure. It shocked him
back into sense.
"_No!_" he said coldly, and soon afterwards left the shop.
Miss Winstock, in the car, sat for the statue of wistful melancholy.
"Heavens!" breathed Mr. Prohack to himself. "The little thing is taking
me seriously. With all her experience of the queer world, and all her
initiative and courage, she is taking me seriously!" He was touched; his
irony became sympathetic, and he thought: "How young the young are!"
Her smile as he rejoined her had pathos in it. The totality of her was
delicious.
"You cannot be all bad, Miss Winstock," said he to her, after
instructing the chauffeur, "because nobody is. You are undisciplined.
You do wild and rash things--you have already accomplished several this
morning. But you have righteous instincts, though not often enough. Of
course, with one word to the insurance company I could save you. The
difficulty is that I could not save you without saving Mr. Carrel Quire
also. And it would be very wrong of me to save Mr. Carrel Quire, for to
save him would be to jeopardise the future of the British Empire,
because unless he is scotched, that man's frantic egotism and ruthless
ambition will achieve political disaster for four hundred million human
beings. I should like to save you. But can I weigh you in the balance
against an Empire? Can I, I say?"
"No," answered Miss Winstock weakly but sincerely.
"That's just where you're wrong," said Mr. Prohack. "I can. And you are
shamefully ignorant of history. Never yet when empire, any empire, has
been weighed in the balance against a young and attractive woman has the
young woman failed to win! That is a dreadful fact, but men are thus
constituted. Had you been a hag, I should not have hesitated to do my
duty to my country. But as you are what you are, and sitting so
agreeably in my car, I will save you and let my country go."
"Oh! Mr. Prohack, you are very kind--but every one told me you were."
"No! I am a knave. Also there is a condition."
"I will agree to anything."
"You must leave Mr. Carrel Quire's service. That man is dangerous not
only to empires. The entire environment is the very worst decently
possible for a girl like you. Get away from it. If you don't undertake
to give him notice at once, and withdraw entirely from his set, then I
will ruin both you and him."
"But I shall starve," cried Miss Winstock. "I shall never find another
place without influence, and I have no more influence."
"Have the Winstocks no money?"
"Not a penny."
"And have the Paulles no money?"
"None for me."
"You are the ideal programme-girl in a theatre," said Mr. Prohack. "You
will never starve. Excuse me for a few minutes. I have another very
important appointment," he added, as the car stopped in Piccadilly.
After a quarter of an hour spent in learning that suits were naught,
neckties were naught, shirts, collars, socks and even braces were
naught, but that hats alone made a man of fashion and idleness, Mr.
Prohack returned to Miss Winstock and announced:
"I will engage you as my private secretary. I need one very badly
indeed. In fact I cannot understand how, with all my engagements, I have
been able to manage without one so long. Your chief duties will be to
keep on good terms with my wife and daughter, and not to fall in love
with my son. If you were not too deeply preoccupied with my chauffeur,
you may have noticed a young man who came out of the tailors' just
before I did. That was my son."
"Oh!" exclaimed Miss Winstock, "the boy who drove off in Lady Massulam's
car?"
"Was that Lady Massulam?" asked Mr. Prohack before he had had time to
recover from the immense effect of hearing the startling, almost
legendary name of Lady Massulam in connection with his son.
"Of course," said Miss Winstock. "Didn't you know?"
Mr. Prohack ignored her pertness.
"Well," he proceeded, having now successfully concealed his emotion,
"after having dealt as I suggest with my wife and children, you will
deal with my affairs. You shall have the same salary as Mr. Carrel Quire
paid--or forgot to pay. Do you agree or not?"
"I should love it," replied Miss Winstock with enthusiasm.
"What is your Christian name?"
"Mimi."
"So it is. I remember now. Well, it won't do at all. Never mention it
again, please."
When he had accompanied Mimi to a neighbouring post office and sent off
a suitable telegram of farewell to Mr. Carrel Quire in her name, Mr.
Prohack abandoned her till the morrow, and drove off quickly to pick up
his wife for the Grand Babylon lunch.
"I am a perfect lunatic," said he to himself. "It must be the effect of
riches. However, I don't care."
He meant that he didn't care about the conceivable consequences of
engaging Mimi Winstock as secretary. But what he did care about was the
conjuncture of Lady Massulam and Charlie.
CHAPTER XIII
FURTHER IDLENESS
I
Strange, inconceivable as it may appear to people of the great world and
readers of newspapers, Mr. Prohack, C.B., had never in his life before
been inside the Grand Babylon Hotel. Such may be the narrow and mean
existence forced by circumstances upon secretly powerful servants of the
Crown. He arrived late, owing to the intricate preparations of his wife
and daughter for Charlie's luncheon. These two were unsuccessfully
pretending not to be nervous, and their nervousness reacted upon Mr.
Prohack, who perceived with disgust that his gay and mischievous mood of
the morning was slipping away from him despite his efforts to retain it.
He knew now definitely that his health had taken the right turn, and yet
he could not prod the youthful Sissie as he had prodded the youthful
Mimi Winstock. Moreover Mimi was a secret which would have to be
divulged, and this secret not only weighed heavy within him, but seemed
disturbingly to counterbalance the secrets that Charlie was withholding.
On the present occasion he saw little of the Grand Babylon, for as soon
as he mentioned his son's name to the nonchalant official behind the
enquiry counter the official changed like lightning into an obsequious
courtier, and Charles's family was put in charge of a hovering attendant
boy, who escorted it in a lift and along a mile of corridors, and
Charlie's family was kept waiting at a door until the voice of Charlie
permitted the boy to open the door. A rather large parlour set with a
table for five; a magnificent view from the window of a huge
white-bricked wall and scores of chimney pots and electric wires, and a
moving grey sky above! Charlie, too, was unsuccessfully pretending not
to be nervous.
"Hullo, kid!" he greeted his sister.
"Hullo yourself," responded Sissie.
They shook hands. (They very rarely kissed. However, Charlie kissed his
mother. Even he would not have dared not to kiss her.)
"Mater," said he, "let me introduce you to Lady Massulam."
Lady Massulam had been standing in the window. She came forward with a
pleasant, restrained smile and made the acquaintance of Charlie's
family; but she was not talkative. Her presence, coming as a terrific
surprise to the ladies of the Prohack family, and as a fairly powerful
surprise to Mr. Prohack, completed the general constraint. Mrs. Prohack
indeed was somewhat intimidated by it. Mrs. Prohack's knowledge of Lady
Massulam was derived exclusively from _The Daily Picture_, where her
portrait was constantly appearing, on all sorts of pretexts, and where
she was described as a leader of London society. Mr. Prohack knew of her
as a woman credited with great feats of war-work, and also with a
certain real talent for organisation; further, he had heard that she had
a gift for high finance, and exercised it not without profit. As she
happened to be French by birth, no steady English person was seriously
upset by the fact that her matrimonial career was obscure, and as she
happened to be very rich everybody raised sceptical eyebrows at the
assertion that her husband (a knight) was dead; for _The Daily Picture_
implanted daily in the minds of millions of readers the grand truth that
to the very rich nothing can happen simply. The whole _Daily Picture_
world was aware that of late she had lived at the Grand Babylon Hotel in
permanence. That world would not have recognised her from her published
portraits, which were more historical than actual. Although
conspicuously anti-Victorian she had a Victorian beauty of the
impressive kind; she had it still. Her hair was of a dark lustrous brown
and showed no grey. In figure she was tall, and rather more than plump
and rather less than fat. Her perfect and perfectly worn clothes proved
that she knew just how to deal with herself. She would look forty in a
theatre, fifty in a garden, and sixty to her maid at dawn.
This important person spoke, when she did speak, with a scarcely
perceptible French accent in a fine clear voice. But she spoke little
and said practically nothing: which was a shock to Marian Prohack, who
had imagined that in the circles graced by Lady Massulam conversation
varied from badinage to profundity and never halted. It was not that
Lady Massulam was tongue-tied, nor that she was impolite; it was merely
that with excellent calmness she did not talk. If anybody handed her a
subject, she just dropped it; the floor around her was strewn with
subjects.
The lunch was dreadful, socially. It might have been better if Charlie's
family had not been tormented by the tremendous question: what had
Charlie to do with Lady Massulam? Already Charlie's situation was
sufficient of a mystery, without this arch-mystery being spread all over
it. And inexperienced Charlie was a poor host; as a host he was
positively pathetic, rivalling Lady Massulam in taciturnity.
Sissie took to chaffing her brother, and after a time Charlie said
suddenly, with curtness:
"Have you dropped that silly dance-scheme of yours, kid?"
Sissie was obliged to admit that she had.
"Then I tell you what you might do. You might come and live here with me
for a bit. I want a hostess, you know."
"I will," said Sissie, straight. No consultation of parents!
This brief episode overset Mrs. Prohack. The lunch worsened, to such a
point that Mr. Prohack began to grow light-hearted, and chaffed Charlie
in his turn. He found material for chaff in the large number of newly
bought books that were lying about the room. There was even the
_Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics_ in eleven volumes. Queer
possessions for a youth who at home had never read aught but the
periodical literature of automobilism! Could this be the influence of
Lady Massulam? Then the telephone bell rang, and it was like a signal of
salvation. Charlie sprang at the instrument.
"For you," he said, indicating Lady Massulam, who rose.
"Oh!" said she. "It's Ozzie."
"Who's Ozzie?" Charlie demanded, without thought.
"No doubt Oswald Morfey," said Mr. Prohack, scoring over his son.
"He wants to see me. May I ask him to come up for coffee?"
"Oh! Do!" said Sissie, also without thought. She then blushed.
Mr. Prohack thought suspiciously and apprehensively:
"I bet anything he's found out that my daughter is here."
Ozzie transformed the final act of the luncheon. An adept
conversationalist, he created conversationalists on every side. Mrs.
Prohack liked him at once. Sissie could not keep her eyes off him.
Charlie was impressed by him. Lady Massulam treated him with the
familiarity of an intimate. Mr. Prohack alone was sinister in attitude.
Ozzie brought the great world into the room with him. In his simpering
voice he was ready to discuss all the phenomena of the universe; but
after ten minutes Mr. Prohack noticed that the fellow had one sole
subject on his mind. Namely, a theatrical first-night, fixed for that
very evening; a first-night of the highest eminence; one of Mr. Asprey
Chown's first-nights, boomed by the marvellous showmanship of Mr. Asprey
Chown into a mighty event. The competition for seats was prodigious, but
of course Lady Massulam had obtained her usual stall.
"What a pity we can't go!" said Sissie simply.
"Will you all come in my box?" astonishingly replied Mr. Oswald Morfey,
embracing in his weak glance the entire Prohack family.
"The fellow came here on purpose to fix this," said Mr. Prohack to
himself as the matter was being effusively clinched.
"I must go," said he aloud, looking at his watch. "I have a very
important appointment."
"But I wanted to have a word with you, dad," said Charlie, in quite a
new tone across the table.
"Possibly," answered the superior ironic father in Mr. Prohack, who
besides being sick of the luncheon party was determined that nothing
should interfere with his Median and Persian programme. "Possibly. But
that will be for another time."
"Well, to-night then," said Charlie, dashed somewhat.
"Perhaps," said Mr. Prohack. Yet he was burning to hear his son's word.
II
However, Mr. Prohack did not succeed in loosing himself from the
embraces of the Grand Babylon Hotel for another thirty minutes. He
offered to abandon the car, to abandon everything to his wife and
daughter, and to reach his next important appointment by the common
methods of conveyance employed by common people; but the ladies would
permit no such thing; they announced their firm intention of personally
escorting him to his destination. The party seemed to be unable to break
up. There was a considerable confabulation between Eve and Lady Massulam
at the entrance to the lift.
Mr. Prohack noticed anew that Eve's attitude to Lady Massulam was still
a flattering one. Indeed Eve showed that in her opinion the meeting with
so great a personage as Lady Massulam was not quite an ordinary episode
in her simple existence. And Lady Massulam was now talking with a free
flow to Eve. As soon as the colloquy had closed and Eve had at length
joined her simmering husband in the lift, Charlie must have a private
chat with Lady Massulam, apart, mysterious, concerning their affairs,
whatever their affairs might be! In spite of himself, Mr. Prohack was
impressed by the demeanour of the young man and the mature blossom of
womanhood to each other. They exhibited a mutual trust; they understood
each other; they liked each other. She was more than old enough to be
his mamma, and yet as she talked to him she somehow became a dignified
girl. Mr. Prohack was disturbed in a manner which he would never have
admitted,--how absurd to fancy that Lady Massulam had in her impressive
head a notion of marrying the boy! Still, such unions had occurred!--but
he was pleasantly touched, too.
Then Oswald Morfey and Sissie made another couple, very different, more
animated, and equally touching. Ozzie seemed to grow more likeable, and
less despicable, under the honest and frankly ardent gaze of Miss
Prohack; and Mr. Prohack was again visited by a doubt whether the fellow
was after all the perfectly silly ass which he was reputed to be.
In the lift, Lady Massulam having offered her final adieux, Ozzie opened
up to Mrs. Prohack the subject of an organisation called the United
League of all the Arts. Mr. Prohack would not listen to this. He hated
leagues, and especially leagues of arts. He knew in the marrow of his
spine that they were preposterous; but Mrs. Prohack and Sissie listened
with unfeigned eagerness to the wonderful tale of the future of the
United League of all the Arts. And when, emerging from the lift, Mr.
Prohack strolled impatiently on ahead, the three stood calmly moveless
to converse, until Mr. Prohack had to stroll impatiently back again. As
for Charlie, he stood by himself; there was leisure for the desired word
with his father, but Mr. Prohack had bluntly postponed that, and thus
the leisure was wasted.
Without consulting Mr. Prohack's wishes, Ozzie drew the ladies towards
the great lounge, and Mr. Prohack at a distance unwillingly after them.
In the lounge so abundantly enlarged and enriched since the days of the
celebrated Felix Babylon, the founder of the hotel, post-lunch coffee
was merging into afternoon tea. The number of idle persons in the world,
and the number of busy persons who ministered to them, and the number of
artistic persons who played voluptuous music to their idleness, struck
Mr. Prohack as merely prodigious. He had not dreamed that idleness on so
grandiose a scale flourished in the city which to him had always been a
city of hard work and limited meal-hours. He saw that he had a great
deal to learn before he could hope to be as skilled in idleness as the
lowest of these experts in the lounge. He tapped his foot warningly. No
effect on his women. He tapped more loudly, as the hatred of being in a
hurry took possession of him. Eve looked round with a delightful
placatory smile which conjured an answering smile into the face of her
husband.
He tried to be irritated after smiling, and advancing said in a would-be
fierce tone:
"If this lunch lasts much longer I shall barely have time to dress for
dinner."
But the effort was a failure--so complete that Sissie laughed at him.
He had expected that in the car his women would relate to him the
sayings and doings of Ozzie Morfey in relation to the United League of
all the Arts. But they said not a syllable on the matter. He knew they
were hiding something formidable from him. He might have put a question,
but he was too proud to do so. Further, he despised them because they
essayed to discuss Lady Massulam impartially, as though she was just a
plain body, or nobody at all. A nauseating pretence on their part.
Crossing a street, the car was held up by a procession of unemployed,
with guardian policemen, a band consisting chiefly of drums, and a
number of collarless powerful young men who shook white boxes of coppers
menacingly in the faces of passers-by.
"Instead of encouraging them, the police ought to forbid these
processions of unemployed," said Eve gravely. "They're becoming a
perfect nuisance."
"Why!" said Mr. Prohack, "this car of yours is a procession of
unemployed."
This sardonic pleasantry pleased Mr. Prohack as much as it displeased
Mrs. Prohack. It seemed to alleviate his various worries, and the
process of alleviation went further when he remembered that, though he
would be late for his important appointment, he had really lost no time
because Dr. Veiga had forbidden him to keep this particular appointment
earlier than two full hours after a meal.
"Don't take cold, darling," Eve urged with loving solicitude as he left
the car to enter the place of rendezvous. Sissie grinned at him
mockingly. They both knew that he had never kept such an appointment
before.
III
Solemnity, and hush, and antique menials stiff with tradition,
surrounded him. As soon as he had paid the entrance fee and deposited
all his valuables in a drawer of which the key was formally delivered to
him, he was motioned through a turnstile and requested to permit his
boots to be removed. He consented. White linens were then handed to him.
"See here," he said with singular courage to the attendant. "I've never
been into one of these resorts before. Where do I go?"
The attendant, who was a bare-footed mild child dressed in the Moorish
mode, reassuringly charged himself with Mr. Prohack's well-being, and
led the aspirant into a vast mosque with a roof of domes and little
glowing windows of coloured glass. In the midst of the mosque was a pale
green pool. White figures reclined in alcoves, round the walls. A
fountain played--the only orchestra. There was an eastern sound of hands
clapped, and another attendant glided across the carpeted warm floor.
Mr. Prohack understood that, in this immense seclusion, when you desired
no matter what you clapped your hands and were served. A beautiful peace
descended upon him and enveloped him; and he thought: "This is the most
wonderful place in the world. I have been waiting for this place for
twenty years."
He yielded without reserve to its unique invitation. But some time
elapsed before he could recover from the unquestionable fact that he was
still within a quarter of a mile of Piccadilly Circus.
From the explanations of the attendant and from the precise orders which
he had received from Dr. Veiga regarding the right method of conduct in
a Turkish bath, Mr. Prohack, being a man of quick mind, soon devised the
order of the ceremonial suited to his case, and began to put it into
execution. At first he found the ceremonial exacting. To part from all
his clothes and to parade through the mosque in attire of which the
principal items were a towel and the key of his valuables (adorning his
wrist) was ever so slightly an ordeal to one of his temperament and
upbringing. To sit unsheltered in blinding steam was not amusing, though
it was exciting. But the steam-chapel (as it might be called) of the
mosque was a delight compared to the second next chapel further on,
where the woodwork of the chairs was too hot to touch and where a
gigantic thermometer informed Mr. Prohack that with only another fifty
degrees of heat he would have achieved boiling point.
He remembered that it was in this chamber he must drink iced tonic water
in quantity. He clapped his streaming hands clammily, and a tall, thin,
old man whose whole life must have been lived near boiling point,
immediately brought the draught. Short of the melting of the key of his
valuables everything possible happened in this extraordinary chamber.
But Mr. Prohack was determined to shrink from naught in the pursuit of
idleness.
And at length, after he had sat in a less ardent chapel, and in still
another chapel been laid out on a marble slab as for an autopsy and,
defenceless, attacked for a quarter of an hour by a prize-fighter, and
had jumped desperately into the ice-cold lake and been dragged out and
smothered in thick folds of linen, and finally reposed horizontal in his
original alcove,--then he was conscious of an inward and profound
conviction that true, perfect, complete and supreme idleness had been
attained. He had no care in the world; he was cut off from the world; he
had no family; he existed beatifically and individually in a sublime and
satisfied egotism.
But, such is the insecurity of human organisms and institutions, in less
than two minutes he grew aware of a strange sensation within him, which
sensation he ultimately diagnosed as hunger. To clap his hands was the
work of an instant. The oncoming attendant recited a catalogue of the
foods at his disposal; and the phrase "welsh rarebit" caught his
attention. He must have a welsh rarebit; he had not had a welsh rarebit
since he was at school. It magically arrived, on an oriental tray, set
on a low Moorish table.
Eating the most wonderful food of his life and drinking tea, he looked
about and saw that two of the unoccupied sofas in his alcove were strewn
with garments; the owners of the garments had doubtlessly arrived during
his absence in the chapels and were now in the chapels themselves. He
lay back; earthly phenomena lost their hard reality....
When he woke up the mosque was a pit of darkness glimmering with sharp
points of electric light. He heard voices, the voices of two men who
occupied the neighbouring sofas. They were discoursing to each other
upon the difficulties of getting good whiskey in Afghanistan and in Rio
de Janeiro respectively. From whiskey they passed to even more
interesting matters, and Mr. Prohack, for the first time, began to learn
how the other half lives, to such an extent that he thought he had
better turn on the lamp over his head. Whereupon the conversation on the
neighbouring sofas curved off to the English weather in late autumn.
Then Mr. Prohack noticed a deep snore. He perceived that the snore
originated in a considerable figure that, wrapped in white and showing
to the mosque only a venerable head, was seated in one of the huge
armchairs which were placed near the entrance to every alcove. It seemed
to him that he recognised the snore, and he was not mistaken, for he had
twice before heard it on Sunday afternoons at his chief club. The head
was the head of Sir Paul Spinner. Mr. Prohack recalled that old Paul was
a devotee of the Turkish bath.
Now Mr. Prohack was exceedingly anxious to have speech with old Paul,
for he had heard very interesting rumours of Paul's activities. He
arose softly and approached the easy-chair and surveyed Sir Paul, who in
his then state looked less like a high financier and more like something
chipped off the roof of a cathedral than anything that Mr. Prohack had
ever seen.
But Paul did not waken. A bather plunged into the pool with a tremendous
splash, but Paul did not waken. And Mr. Prohack felt that it would be
contrary to the spirit of the ritual of the mosque to waken him. But he
decided that if he waited all night he would wait until old Paul
regained consciousness.
At that moment an attendant asked Mr. Prohack if he desired the
attentions of the barber, the chiropodist, or the manicurist. New vistas
opened out before Mr. Prohack. He said yes. After the barber, he padded
down the stairs from the barber's chapel (which was in the upper story
of the mosque), to observe if there was any change in old Paul's
condition. Paul still slept. Mr. Prohack did similarly after the
chiropodist. Paul still slept. Then again after the manicurist. Paul
still slept. Then a boyish attendant hurried forward and in a very
daring manner shook the monumental Paul by the shoulder.
"You told me to wake you at six, Sir Paul." And Paul woke.
"How simple," reflected Mr. Prohack, "are the problems of existence when
they are tackled with decision! Here have I been ineffectively trying to
waken the fellow for the past hour. But I forgot that he who wishes the
end must wish the means, and my regard for the ritual of the mosque was
absurd."
He retired into the alcove to dress, keeping a watchful eye upon old
Paul. He felt himself to be in the highest state of physical efficiency.
From head to foot he was beyond criticism. When Mr. Prohack had got as
far as his waistcoat Sir Paul uprose ponderously from the easy-chair.
"Hi, Paul!"
The encounter between the two friends was one of those affectionate and
ecstatic affairs that can only happen in a Turkish Bath.
"I've been trying to get you on the 'phone half the day," grunted Paul
Spinner, subsiding on to Mr. Prohack's sofa.
"I've been out all day. Horribly busy," said Mr. Prohack. "What's wrong?
Anything wrong?"
"Oh, no! Only I thought you'd like to know I've finished that deal."
"I did hear some tall stories, but not a word from you, old thing." Mr.
Prohack tried to assume a tranquillity which he certainly did not feel.
"Well, I never sing until I'm out of the wood. But this time I'm out
sooner than I expected."
"Any luck?"
"Yes. But I dictated a letter to you before I came here."
"I suppose you can't remember what there was in it."
"I shall get the securities next week."
"What securities?"
"Well, you'll receive"--here Paul dropped his voice--"three thousand
short of a quarter of a million in return for what you put in, my boy."
"Then I'm worth over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds!" murmured
Mr. Prohack feebly. And he added, still more feebly: "Something will
have to be done about this soon." His heart was beating against his
waistcoat like an engine.
CHAPTER XIV
END OF AN IDLE DAY
I
It is remarkable that even in the most fashionable shopping
thoroughfares certain shops remain brilliantly open, exposing
plush-cushioned wares under a glare of electricity in the otherwise
darkened street, for an hour or so after all neighbouring establishments
have drawn down their blinds and put up their shutters. An interesting
point of psychology is involved in this phenomenon.
On his way home from the paradise of the mosque, Mr. Prohack, afoot and
high-spirited, and energised by a long-forgotten sensation of physical
well-being, called in at such a shop, and, with the minimum of parley,
bought an article enclosed in a rich case. A swift and happy impulse on
his part! The object was destined for his wife, and his intention in
giving it was to help him to introduce more easily to her notice the
fact that he was now, or would shortly be, worth over quarter of a
million of money. For he was a strange, silly fellow, and just as he had
been conscious of a certain false shame at inheriting a hundred thousand
pounds, so now he was conscious of a certain false shame at having
increased his possessions to two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
The Eagle was waiting in front of Mr. Prohack's door; he wondered what
might be the latest evening project of his women, for he had not ordered
the car so early; perhaps the first night had been postponed; however,
he was too discreet, or too dignified, to make any enquiry from the
chauffeur; too indifferent to the projects of his beloved women. He
would be quite content to sit at home by himself, reflecting upon the
marvels of existence and searching among them for his soul.
Within the house, servants were rushing about in an atmosphere of
excitement and bell-ringing. He divined that his wife and daughter were
dressing simultaneously for an important occasion--either the first
night or something else. In that feverish environment he forgot the
form of words which he had carefully prepared for the breaking to his
wife of the great financial news. Fortunately she gave him no chance to
blunder.
"Oh, Arthur, Arthur!" she cried, sweetly reproachful, as with an assumed
jauntiness he entered the bedroom. "How late you are! I expected you
back an hour ago at least. Your things are laid out in the boudoir. You
haven't got a moment to spare. We're late as it is." She was by no means
dressed, and the bedroom looked as if it had been put to the sack;
nearly every drawer was ajar, and the two beds resembled a second-hand
shop.
Mr. Prohack's self-protective instinct at once converted him into a
porcupine. An attempt was being made to force him into a hurry, and he
loathed hurry.
"I'm not late," said he, "because I didn't say when I should return. It
won't take me more than a quarter of an hour to eat, and we've got heaps
of time for the theatre."
"I'm giving a little dinner in the Grand Babylon restaurant," said Eve,
"and of course we must be there first. Sissie's arranged it for me on
the 'phone. It'll be much more amusing than dining here, and it saves
the servants." Yet the woman had recently begun to assert that the
servants hadn't enough to do!
"Ah!" said Mr. Prohack, startled. "And who are the guests?"
"Oh! Nobody! Only us and Charlie, of course, and Oswald Morfey, and
perhaps Lady Massulam. I've told Charlie to do the ordering."
"I should have thought one meal per diem at the Grand Babylon would have
been sufficient."
"But this is in the _restaurant_, don't I tell you? Oh, dear! That's
three times I've tried to do my hair. It's always the same when I want
it nice. Now do get along, Arthur!"
"Strange!" said he with a sardonic blitheness. "Strange how it's always
my fault when your hair goes wrong!" And to himself he said: "All right!
All right! I just shan't inform you about that quarter of a million.
You've no leisure for details to-night, my girl."
And he went into the boudoir.
His blissful serenity was too well established to be overthrown by
anything short of a catastrophe. Nevertheless it did quiver slightly
under the shock of Eve's new tactics in life. This was the woman who, on
only the previous night, had been inveighing against the ostentation of
her son's career at the Grand Babylon. Now she seemed determined to
rival him in showiness, to be the partner of his alleged vulgarity. That
the immature Sissie should suddenly drop the ideals of the new poor for
the ideals of the new rich was excusable. But Eve! But that modest
embodiment of shy and quiet commonsense! She, who once had scorned the
world of _The Daily Picture_, was more and more disclosing a desire for
that world. And where now were her doubts about the righteousness of
Charlie's glittering deeds? And where was the ancient sagacity which
surely should have prevented her from being deceived by the
superficialities of an Oswald Morfey? Was she blindly helping to prepare
a disaster for her blind daughter? Was the explanation that she had
tasted of the fruit? The horrid thought crossed Mr. Prohack's mind: _All
women are alike._ He flung it out of his loyal mind, trying to
substitute: All women except Eve are alike. But it came back in its
original form.... Not that he cared, really. If Eve had transformed
herself into a Cleopatra his ridiculous passion for her would have
suffered no modification.
Lying around the boudoir were various rectangular parcels, addressed in
flowing calligraphy to himself: the first harvest-loads of his busy
morning. The sight of them struck his conscience. Was not he, too,
following his wife on the path of the new rich? No! As ever he was
blameless. He was merely executing the prescription of his doctor, who
had expounded the necessity of scientific idleness and the curative
effect of fine clothes on health. True, he knew himself to be cured, but
if nature had chosen to cure him too quickly, that was not his fault....
He heard his wife talking to Machin in the bedroom, and Machin talking
to his wife; and the servant's voice was as joyous and as worried as if
she herself, and not Eve, were about to give a little dinner at the
Grand Babylon. Queer! Queer! The phrase 'a quarter of a million' glinted
and flashed in the circumambient air. But it was almost a meaningless
phrase. He was like a sort of super-savage and could not count beyond a
hundred thousand. And, quite unphilosophical, he forgot that the ecstasy
produced by a hundred thousand had passed in a few days, and took for
granted that the ecstasy produced by two hundred and fifty thousand
would endure for ever.
"Take that thing off, please," he commanded his wife when he returned to
the bedroom in full array. She was by no means complete, but she had
achieved some progress, and was trying the effect of her garnet
necklace.
"But it's the best I've got," said she.
"No, it isn't," he flatly contradicted her, and opened the case so newly
purchased.
"Arthur!" she gasped, spellbound, entranced, enchanted.
"That's my name."
"Pearls! But--but--this must have cost thousands!"
"And what if it did?" he enquired placidly, clasping the thing with much
delicacy round her neck. His own pleasure was intense, and yet he
severely blamed himself. Indeed he called himself a criminal. Scarcely
could he meet her gaze when she put her hands on his shoulders, after a
long gazing into the mirror. And when she kissed him and said with
frenzy that he was a dear and a madman, he privately agreed with her.
She ran to the door.
"Where are you going?"
"I must show Sissie."
"Wait a moment, child. Do you know why I've bought that necklace?
Because the affair with Spinner has come off." He then gave her the
figures.
She observed, not unduly moved:
"But I knew _that_ would be all right."
"How did you know?"
"Because you're so clever. You always get the best of everybody."
He realised afresh that she was a highly disturbing woman. She uttered
highly disturbing verdicts without thought and without warning. You
never knew what she would say.
"I think," he remarked, calmly pretending that she had said something
quite obvious, "that it would be as well for us not to breathe one word
to anybody at all about this new windfall."
She eagerly agreed.
"But we must really begin to spend--I mean spend regularly."
"Yes, of course," he admitted.
"Otherwise it would be absurd, wouldn't it?"
"Yes, of course."
"Arthur."
"Yes."
"How much will it be--in income?"
"Well, I'm not going in for any more flutters. No! I've done absolutely
with all speculating idiocies. Providence has watched over us. I take
the hint. Therefore my investments will all have to be entirely safe and
sound. No fancy rates of interest. I should say that by the time old
Paul's fixed up my investments we shall have a bit over four hundred
pounds a week coming in--if that's any guide to you."
"Arthur, isn't it _wicked_!"
She examined afresh the necklace.
By the time they were all three in the car, Mr. Prohack had become
aware of the fact that in Sissie's view he ought to have bought two
necklaces while he was about it.
Sissie's trunks were on the roof of the car. She had decided to take up
residence at the Grand Babylon that very night. The rapidity and the
uncontrollability of events made Mr. Prohack feel dizzy.
"I hope you've brought some money, darling," said his wife.
II
"Lend me some money, will you?" murmured Mr. Prohack lightly to his
splendid son, after he had glanced at the bill for Eve's theatre dinner
at the Grand Babylon. Mr. Prohack had indeed brought some money with
him, but not enough. "Haven't got any," said Charlie, with equal
lightness. "Better give me the bill. I'll see to it." Whereupon Charlie
signed the bill, and handed the bowing waiter five ten shilling notes.
"That's not enough," said Mr. Prohack.
"Not enough for the tip. Well, it'll have to be. I never give more than
ten per cent."
Mr. Prohack strove to conceal his own painful lack of worldliness. He
had imagined that he had in his pockets heaps of money to pay for a meal
for a handful of people. He was mistaken; that was all, and the incident
had no importance, for a few pounds more or less could not matter in the
least to a gentleman of his income. Yet he felt guilty of being a
waster. He could not accustom himself to the scale of expenditure.
Barely in the old days could he have earned in a week the price of the
repast consumed now in an hour. The vast apartment was packed with
people living at just that rate of expenditure and seeming to think
naught of it. "But do two wrongs make a right?" he privately demanded of
his soul. Then his soul came to the rescue with its robust commonsense
and replied:
"Perhaps two wrongs don't make a right, but five hundred wrongs
positively must make a right." And he felt better.
And suddenly he understood the true function of the magnificent
orchestra that dominated the scene. It was the function of a brass band
at a quack-dentist's booth in a fair,--to drown the cries of the victims
of the art of extraction.
"Yes," he reflected, full of health and carelessness. "This is a truly
great life."
The party went off in two automobiles, his own and Lady Massulam's.
Cars were fighting for room in front of the blazing facade of the
Metropolitan Theatre, across which rose in fire the title of the
entertainment, _Smack Your Face_, together with the names of Asprey
Chown and Eliza Fiddle. Car after car poured out a contingent of
glorious girls and men and was hustled off with ferocity by a row of
gigantic and implacable commissionaires. Mr. Oswald Morfey walked
straight into the building at the head of his guests. Highly expensive
persons were humbling themselves at the little window of the box office,
but Ozzie held his course, and officials performed obeisances which
stopped short only at falling flat on their faces at the sight of him.
Tickets were not for him.
"This is a beautiful box," said Eve to him, amazed at the grandeur of
the receptacle into which they had been ushered.
"It's Mr. Chown's own box."
"Then isn't Mr. Chown to be here to-night?"
"No! He went to Paris this morning for a rest. The acting manager will
telephone to him after each act. That's how he always does, you know."
"When the cat's away the mice will play," thought Mr. Prohack
uncomfortably, with the naughty sensations of a mouse. The huge
auditorium was a marvellous scene of excited brilliance. As the stalls
filled up a burst of clapping came at intervals from the unseen pit.
"What are they clapping for?" said the simple Eve, who, like Mr.
Prohack, had never been to a first-night before, to say nothing of such
a super-first-night as this.
"Oh!" replied Ozzie negligently. "Some one they know by sight just come
into the stalls. The _chic_ thing in the pit is to recognise, and to
show by applause that you have recognised. The one that applauds the
oftenest wins the game in the pit."
At those words and their tone Mr. Prohack looked at Ozzie with a new
eye, as who should be thinking: "Is Sissie right about this fellow after
all?"
Sissie sat down modestly and calmly next to her mother. Nobody could
guess from her apparently ingenuous countenance that she knew that she,
and not the Terror of the departments and his wife, was the originating
cause of Mr. Morfey's grandiose hospitality.
"I suppose the stalls are full of celebrities?" said Eve.
"They're full of people who've paid twice the ordinary price for their
seats," answered Ozzie.
"Who's that extraordinary old red-haired woman in the box opposite?"
Eve demanded.
"That's Enid."
"Enid?"
"Yes. You know the Enid stove, don't you? All ladies know the Enid
stove. It's been a household word for forty years. That's the original
Enid. Her father invented the stove, and named it after her when she was
a girl. She never misses a first-night."
"How extraordinary! Is she what you call a celebrity?"
"Rather!"
"Now," said Mr. Prohack. "Now, at last I understand the real meaning of
fame."
"But that's Charlie down there!" exclaimed Eve, suddenly, pointing to
the stalls and then looking behind her to see if there was not another
Charlie in the box.
"Yes," Ozzie agreed. "Lady Massulam had an extra stall, and as five's a
bit of a crowd in this box.... I thought he'd told you."
"He had not," said Eve.
The curtain went up, and this simple gesture on the part of the curtain
evoked enormous applause. The audience could not control the expression
of its delight. A young lady under a sunshade appeared; the mere fact of
her existence threw the audience into a new ecstasy. An old man with a
red nose appeared: similar demonstrations from the audience. When these
two had talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was
tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to
the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by illustrious French actors
and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille,
the applause was quintupled. At the end of the tragedy the applause was
decupled. Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem,
and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two
thousand cushions of two thousand colours, and the audience rose at
Eliza and Eliza rose at the audience, and the resulting frenzy was the
sublimest frenzy that ever shook a theatre. The piece was stopped dead
for three minutes while the audience and Eliza protested a mutual and
unique passion. From this point onwards Mr. Prohack lost his head. He
ran to and fro in the bewildering glittering maze of the piece, seeking
for an explanation, for a sign-post, for a clue, for the slightest hint,
and found nothing. He had no alternative but to cling to Eliza Fiddle,
and he clung to her desperately. She was willing to be clung to. She
gave herself, not only to Mr. Prohack, but to every member of the
audience separately; she gave herself in the completeness of all her
manifestations. The audience was rich in the possession of the whole of
her individuality, which was a great deal. She sang, danced, chattered,
froze, melted, laughed, cried, flirted, kissed, kicked, cursed, and
turned somersaults with the fury of a dervish, the languor of an
odalisque, and the inexhaustibility of a hot-spring geyser.... And at
length Mr. Prohack grew aware of a feeling within himself that was at
war with the fresh, fine feeling of physical well-being. "I have never
seen a revue before," he said in secret. "Is it possible that I am
bored?"
III
"Would you care to go behind and be introduced to Miss Fiddle?" Ozzie
suggested at the interval after the curtain had been raised seventeen
times in response to frantic shoutings, cheerings, thumpings and
clappings, and the mighty tumult of exhilaration had subsided into a
happy buzz that arose from all the seats in the entire orange-tinted
brilliant auditorium. The ladies would not go; the ladies feared, they
said, to impose their company upon Miss Fiddle in the tremendous strain
of her activities. They spoke primly and decisively. It was true that
they feared; but their fear was based on consideration for themselves
rather than on consideration for Miss Fiddle. Ozzie was plainly snubbed.
He had offered a wonderful privilege, and it had been disdained.
Mr. Prohack could not bear the spectacle of Ozzie's discomfiture. His
sad weakness for pleasing people overcame him, and, putting his hand
benevolently on the young man's shoulder, he said:
"My dear fellow, personally I'm dying to go."
They went by strangely narrow corridors and through iron doors across
the stage, whose shirt-sleeved, ragged population seemed to be behaving
as though the last trump had sounded, and so upstairs and along a broad
passage full of doors ajar from which issued whispers and exclamations
and transient visions of young women. From the star's dressing-room, at
the end, a crowd of all sorts and conditions of persons was being
pushed. Mr. Prohack trembled with an awful apprehension, and asked
himself vainly what in the name of commonsense he was doing there, and
prayed that Ozzie might be refused admission. The next moment he was
being introduced to a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged dressing-gown.
Her face was thickly caked with paint and powder, her eyes surrounded
with rings of deepest black, her finger-nails red. Mr. Prohack, not
without difficulty, recognised Eliza. A dresser stood on either side of
her. Blinding showers of electric light poured down upon her defenceless
but hardy form. She shook hands, but Mr. Prohack deemed that she ought
to bear a notice: "Danger. Visitors are requested not to touch."
"So good of you to come round," she said, in her rich and powerful
voice, smiling with all her superb teeth. Mr. Prohack, entranced, gazed,
not as at a woman, but as at a public monument. Nevertheless he thought
that she was not a bad kind, and well suited for the rough work of the
world.
"I hope you're all coming to my ball to-night," said she. Mr. Prohack
had never heard of any ball. In an instant she told him that she had
remarked two most charming ladies with him in the box--(inordinate
faculty of observation, mused Mr. Prohack)--and in another instant she
was selling him three two guinea tickets for a grand ball and rout in
aid of the West End Chorus Girls' Aid Association. Could he refuse,
perceiving so clearly as he did that within the public monument was
hiding a wistful creature, human like himself, human like his wife and
daughter? He could not.
"Now you'll _come_?" said she.
Mr. Prohack swore that he would come, his heart sinking as he realised
the consequence of his own foolish weakness. There was a knock at the
door.
"Did you want me, Liza?" said a voice, and a fat gentleman, clothed with
resplendent correctness, stepped into the room. It was the
stage-manager, a god in his way.
Eliza Fiddle became a cyclone.
"I should think I did want you," she said passionately. "That's why I
sent for you, and next time I'll ask you to come quicker. I'm not going
to have that squint-eyed girl on the stage any more to-night. You know,
the one at the end of the row. Twice she spoiled my exit by getting in
the way. And you've got to throw her out, and take it from me. She does
it on purpose."
"I can't throw her out without Mr. Chown's orders, and Mr. Chown's in
Paris."
"Then you refuse?"
A pause.
"Yes."
"Then I'm not going on again to-night, not if I know it. I'm not going
to be insulted in my own theatre."
"It's not the girl's fault. You know they haven't got room to move."
"I don't know anything about that and I don't care. All I know is that
I've finished with that squint-eyed woman, and you can choose right now
between her and me. And so that's that."
Miss Fiddle's fragile complexion had approached to within six inches of
the stage-manager's broad and shiny features, and it had little
resemblance to any of the various faces which audiences associated with
the figure of Eliza Fiddle; it was a face voluptuously distorted by the
violence of emotion. As Miss Fiddle appeared to be under the impression
that she was alone with the stage-manager, Mr. Prohack rendered justice
to that impression by softly departing. Ozzie followed. The
stage-manager also followed. "Where are you going?" they heard Eliza's
voice behind them addressing the stage-manager.
"I'm going to tell your under-study to get ready quick."
An enormous altercation uprose, and faces peeped from every door in the
corridor; but Mr. Prohack stayed not. Ozzie led him to Mr. Asprey
Chown's private room. The Terror of the departments was shaken. Ozzie
laughed gently as he shut the door.
"What will happen?" asked Mr. Prohack, affecting a gaiety he did not
feel.
"What do you think will happen?" simpered Ozzie blandly, "having due
regard to the fact that Miss Fiddle has to choose between three hundred
and fifty pounds a week and a law-suit with Chown involving heavy
damages? I must say there's nobody like Blaggs for keeping these three
hundred and fifty pound a week individuals in order. Chown would sooner
lose forty of them than lose Blaggs. And Eliza knows it. By the way,
what do you think of the show?"
"Will it succeed?"
"You should see the advance booking. There's a thousand pounds in the
house to-night. Chown will be clearing fifteen hundred a week when he's
paid off his production."
"Well, it's marvellous."
"You don't mean the show?"
"No. The profit."
"I agree," simpered Ozzie.
"I'm beginning to like this sizzling idiot," thought Mr. Prohack, as it
were regretfully. They left the imperial richness of Mr. Chown's private
room like brothers.
IV
When Mr. Prohack touched the handle of the door of the box, he felt as
though he were returning to civilisation; he felt less desolated by the
immediate past and by the prospect of the immediate future; he was
yearning for the society of mere women after his commerce with a star at
three hundred and fifty pounds a week. True, he badly wanted to examine
his soul and enquire into his philosophy of life, but he was prepared to
postpone that inquest until the society of mere women had had a
beneficial effect on him.
Charlie, who had been paying a state visit to his mother and sister was
just leaving the box and the curtain was just going up.
"Hullo, dad!" said the youth, "you're the very man I was looking for,"
and he drew his father out into the corridor. "You've got two of the
finest ballroom dancers I ever saw," he added to Ozzie.
"Haven't we!" Ozzie concurred, with faint enthusiasm.
"But the rest of the show ..." Charlie went on, ruthless. "Well, if
Chown's shows were only equal to his showmanship...! Only they aren't!"
Ozzie raised his eyebrows--a skilful gesture that at once defended his
employer and agreed with Charles.
"By the way, dad, I've got a house for you. I've told the mater about it
and she's going to see it to-morrow morning."
"A house!" Mr. Prohack exclaimed weakly, foreseeing new vistas of worry.
"I've got one. I can't live in two."
"But this one's a _house_. You know about it, don't you, Morfey?"
Ozzie gave a nod and a vague smile.
"See here, dad! Come out here a minute."
Ozzie discreetly entered the box and closed the door.
"What is it?" asked Mr. Prohack.
"It's this," Charlie replied, handing his parent a cheque. "I've
deducted what I paid for you to-night from what you lent me not long
since. I've calculated interest on the loan at ten per cent. You can get
ten practically anywhere in these days, worse luck."
"But I don't want this, my boy," Mr. Prohack protested, holding the
cheque as he might have held a lady's handkerchief retrieved from the
ground.
"Well, I'm quite sure I don't," said Charlie, a little stiffly.
There was a pause.
"As you please," said Mr. Prohack, putting the cheque--interest and
all--into his pocket.
"Thanks," said Charlie. "Much obliged. You're a noble father, and I
shouldn't be a bit surprised if you've laid the foundation of my
fortunes. But of course you never know--in my business."
"What _is_ your business?" Mr. Prohack asked timidly, almost
apologetically. He had made up his mind on the previous evening that he
would talk to Charlie as a father ought to talk to a son, that is to
say, like a cross-examining barrister and a moralist combined. He had
decided that it was more than his right--it was his duty to do so. But
now the right, if not the duty, seemed less plain, and he remembered
what he had said to Eve concerning the right attitude of parents to
children. And chiefly he remembered that Charlie was not in his debt.
"I'm a buyer and seller. I buy for less than I sell for. That's how I
live."
"It appears to be profitable."
"Yes. I made over ten thousand in Glasgow, buying an option on an
engineering business--with your money--from people who wanted to get rid
of it, and then selling what I hadn't paid for to people in London who
wanted to get hold of an engineering business up there. Seems simple
enough, and the only reason everybody isn't doing it is that it isn't as
simple as it seems. At least, it's simple, but there's a knack in it. I
found out I'd got the knack through my little deals in motor-bikes and
things. As a matter of fact I didn't find out,--some one told me, and I
began to think.... But don't be alarmed if I go bust. I'm on to a much
bigger option now, in the City. Oh! Very much bigger. If it comes off
... you'll see. Lady Massulam is keen on it, and she's something of a
judge.... Any remarks?"
Mr. Prohack looked cautiously at the young man, his own creation, to
whom, only the other day as it seemed, he had been in the habit of
giving one pound per school-term for pocket-money. And he was
affrighted--not by what he had created, but by the astounding
possibilities of fatherhood, which suddenly presented itself to him as a
most dangerous pursuit.
"No remarks," said he, briefly. What remarks indeed could he offer?
Wildly guessing at the truth about his son, in that conversation with
Eve on the previous evening, he had happened to guess right. And his
sermon to Eve prevented now the issue of remarks.
"Oh! Of course!" Charlie burst out. "You can't tell me anything I don't
know already. I'm a pirate. I'm not producing. All the money I make has
to be earned by somebody else before I get hold of it. I'm not doing
any good to my beautiful country. But I did try to find a useful job,
didn't I? My beautiful country wouldn't have me. It only wanted me in
the trenches. Well, it's got to have me. I'll jolly well make it pay
now. I'll squeeze every penny out of it. I'll teach it a lesson. And why
not? I shall only be shoving its own ideas down its throat. Supposing I
hadn't got this knack and I hadn't had _you_. I might have been wearing
all my ribbons and playing a barrel organ in Oxford Street to-day
instead of living at the Grand Babylon."
"You're becoming quite eloquent in your old age," said Mr. Prohack,
tremulously jocular while looking with alarm into his paternal heart.
Was not he himself a pirate? Had not the hundred and fifty thousand that
was coming to him had to be earned by somebody else? Money did not make
itself.
"Well," retorted Charlie, with a grim smile. "There's one thing to be
said for me. When I _do_ talk, I talk."
"And so at last you've begun to read?"
"I'm not going to be the ordinary millionaire. No fear! Make your mind
easy on that point. Besides, reading isn't so bad after all."
"And what about that house you were speaking of? You aren't going to
plant any of your options on me."
"We'll discuss that to-morrow. I must get back to my seat," said Charlie
firmly, moving away. "So long."
"I say," Mr. Prohack summoned him to return. "I'm rather curious about
the methods of you millionaires. Just when did you sign that cheque for
me? You only lent me the money as we were leaving the hotel."
"I made it out while I was talking to the mater and Sis in your box, of
course."
"How simple are the acts of genius--after they're accomplished!"
observed Mr. Prohack. "Naturally you signed it in the box."
As he rejoined his family he yawned, surprising himself. He began to
feel a mysterious fatigue. The effect of the Turkish bath, without
doubt! The remainder of the evening stretched out in front of him,
interminably tedious. The title of the play was misleading. He could not
smack his face. He wished to heaven he could.... And then, after the
play, the ball! Eliza might tell him to dance with her. She would be
quite capable of such a deed. And by universal convention her
suggestions were the equivalent of demands. Nobody ever could or would
refuse to dance with Eliza.... There she was, all her four limbs
superbly displayed, sweetly smiling with her enormous mouth, just as if
the relations between Blaggs and herself were those of Paul and
Virginia. The excited audience, in the professional phrase, was "eating"
her.
V
Mr. Prohack was really a most absurd person. _Smack Your Face_, when it
came to an end, towards midnight, had established itself as an authentic
enormous success; and because Mr. Prohack did not care for it, because
it bored him, because he found it vulgar and tedious and expensive,
because it tasted in his mouth like a dust-and-ashes sandwich, the
fellow actually felt sad; he felt even bitter. He hated to see the
fashionable and splendid audience unwilling to leave the theatre,
cheering one super-favourite, five arch-favourites and fifteen
favourites, and cheering them again and again, and sending the curtain
up and down and up and down time after time. He could not bear that what
he detested should be deliriously admired. He went so far as to form
views about the decadence of the theatre as an institution. Most of all
he was disgusted because his beloved Eve was not disgusted. Eve said
placidly that she did not think much of the affair, but that she had
thoroughly enjoyed it and wouldn't mind coming on the next night to see
it afresh. He said gloomily:
"And I've been bringing you up for nearly twenty-five years."
As for Sissie, she was quietly and sternly enthusiastic about a lot of
the dancing. She announced her judgment as an expert, and Charlie agreed
with her, and there was no appeal, and Mr. Prohack had the air of an
ignorant outsider whose opinions were negligible. Further, he was absurd
in that, though he assuredly had no desire whatever to go to the dance,
he fretted at the delay in getting there. Even when they had all got out
to the porch of the theatre he exhibited a controlled but intense
impatience because Charlie did not produce the car instantly from amidst
the confused hordes of cars that waited in the surrounding streets.
Moreover, as regards the ball, he had foolishly put himself in a false
position; for he was compelled to pretend that he had purchased the
tickets because he personally wanted to go to the ball. Had he not been
learning to dance? Now the fact was that he looked forward to the ball
with terror. He had never performed publicly. He proceeded from one
pretence to another. When Charlie stated curtly that he, Charlie, was
going to no ball, he feigned disappointment, saying that Charlie ought
to go for his sister's sake. Yet he was greatly relieved at Charlie's
departure (even in Lady Massulam's car); he could not stomach the
notion of Charlie cynically watching his infant steps on the polished,
treacherous floor. In the matter of Charlie, Oswald Morfey also feigned
disappointment, but for a different reason. Ozzie wanted to have Sissie
as much as possible to himself.
Mr. Prohack yawned in the car.
"You're over-tired, Arthur. It's the Turkish bath," said Eve with
commiseration. This was a bad enough mistake on her part, but she
worsened it by adding: "Perhaps the wisest thing would be for us all to
go home."
Mr. Prohack was extremely exhausted, and would have given his head to go
home; but so odd, so contrary, so deceitful and so silly was his nature
that he replied:
"Darling! Where on earth do you get these ideas from? There's nothing
like a Turkish bath for stimulating you, and I'm not at all tired. I
never felt better in my life. But the atmosphere of that theatre would
make anybody yawn."
The ball was held in a picture-gallery where an exhibition of the
International Portrait Society was in progress. The crush of cars at the
portals was as keen as that at the portals of the Metropolitan. And all
the persons who got out of the cars seemed as fresh as if they had just
got out of bed. Mr. Prohack was astonished at the vast number of people
who didn't care what time they went to bed because they didn't care what
time they arose; he was in danger of being morbidly obsessed by the
extraordinary prevalence of idleness. The rooms were full of brilliant
idlers in all colours. Everybody except chorus girls had thought fit to
appear at this ball in aid of the admirably charitable Chorus Girls' Aid
Association. And as everybody was also on the walls, the dancers had to
compete with their portraits--a competition in which many of them were
well beaten.
After they had visited the supper-room, where both Sissie and her mother
did wonderful feats of degustation and Mr. Prohack drank all that was
good for him, Sissie ordered her father to dance with her. He refused.
She went off with Ozzie, while her parents sat side by side on gold
chairs like ancestors. Sissie repeated her command, and Mr. Prohack was
about to disobey when Eliza Fiddle dawned upon the assemblage.
The supernatural creature had been rehearsing until 3 a.m., she had been
trying on clothes from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. She had borne the chief
weight of _Smack Your Face_, on her unique shoulders for nearly three
hours and a half. She had changed into an unforgettable black
ball-dress, cut to demonstrate in the clearest fashion that her
shoulders had suffered no harm; and here she was as fresh as Aphrodite
from the foam. She immediately set herself to bear the chief weight of
the ball on those same defenceless shoulders; for she was, in theory at
any rate, the leading organiser of the affair, and according to the
entire press it was "her" ball. As soon as he saw her Mr. Prohack had a
most ridiculous fear lest she should pick him out for a dance, and to
protect himself he said "All right" to his daughter.
A fox-trot announced itself. In his own drawing-room, with the door
locked, Mr. Prohack could and did treat a fox-trot as child's play. But
now he realised that he had utterly forgotten every movement of the
infernal thing. Agony as he stood up and took his daughter's hand! An
awful conviction that everybody (who was anybody) was staring to witness
the Terror of the departments trying to jazz in public for the first
time. A sick, sinking fear lest some of his old colleagues from the
Treasury might be lurking in corners to guy him! Agony as he collected
himself and swayed his body slightly to catch the rhythm of the tune!
Where in heaven's name was the first beat in the bar?
"Walk first," said Sissie professionally.... He was in motion.
"Now!" said Sissie. "_One_, two. _One_, two." Miraculously he was
dancing! It was as though the whole room was shouting: "They're off!"
Sissie steered him.
"Don't look at your feet!" said she sharply, and like a schoolboy he
chucked his chin obediently up.... Then he was steering her. Although
her feet were the reverse of enormous he somehow could not keep off
them; but that girl was made of hardy stuff and never winced. He was
doing better. Pride was puffing him. Yet he desired the music to stop.
The music did stop.
"Thanks," he breathed.
"Oh, no!" said she. "That's not all." The dancers clapped and the
orchestra resumed. He started again. Couples surged around him, and
sometimes he avoided them and sometimes he did not. Then he saw a head
bobbing not far away, as if it were one cork and he another on a choppy
sea. It resembled Eve's head. It was Eve's head. She was dancing with
Oswald Morfey. He had never supposed that Eve could dance these new
dances.
"Let's stop," said he.
"Certainly not," Sissie forbade. "We must finish it." He finished it,
rather breathless and dizzy. He had lived through it.
"You're perfectly wonderful, Arthur," said Eve when they met.
"Oh no! I'm no good."
"I was frightfully nervous about you at first," said Sissie.
He said briefly:
"You needn't have been. I wasn't."
A little later Eve said to him:
"Aren't you going to ask _me_ to dance, Arthur?"
Dancing with Eve was not quite like dancing with Sissie, but they safely
survived deadly perils. And Mr. Prohack perspired in a very healthy
fashion.
"You dance really beautifully, dear," said Eve, benevolently smiling.
After that he cut himself free and roamed about. He wanted to ask Eliza
Fiddle to dance, and also he didn't want to ask her to dance. However,
he had apparently ceased to exist for her. Ozzie had introduced him to
several radiant young creatures. He wanted to ask them to dance; but he
dared not. And he was furious with himself. To dance with one's daughter
and wife was well enough in its way, but it was not the real thing. It
was without salt. One or two of the radiances glanced at him with
inviting eyes, but no, he dared not face it. He grew gloomy, gloomier.
He thought angrily: "All this is not for me. I'm a middle-aged fool, and
I've known it all along." Life lost its savour and became repugnant.
Fatigue punished him, and simultaneously reduced two hundred and fifty
thousand pounds to the value of about fourpence. It was Eve who got him
away.
"Home," he called to Carthew, after Eve and Sissie had said good-bye to
Ozzie and stowed themselves into the car.
"Excuse me," said Sissie. "You have to deliver me at the Grand Babylon
first."
He had forgotten! This detour was the acutest torture of the night. He
could no longer bear not to be in bed. And when, after endless nocturnal
miles, he did finally get home and into bed, he sighed as one taken off
the rack. Ah! The delicious contact with the pillow!
VI
But there are certain persons who, although their minds are logical
enough, have illogical bodies. Mr. Prohack was one of these. His
ridiculous physical organism (as he had once informed Dr. Veiga) was
least capable of going to sleep when it was most fatigued. If Mr.
Prohack's body had retired to bed four hours earlier than in fact it
did, Mr. Prohack would have slept instantly and with ease. Now, despite
delicious contact with the pillow, he could not 'get off.' And his mind,
influenced by his body, grew restless, then excited, then distressingly
realistic. His mind began to ask fundamental questions, questions not a
bit original but none the less very awkward.
"You've had your first idle day, Mr. Prohack," said his mind
challengingly instead of composing itself to slumber. "It was organised
on scientific lines. It was carried out with conscientiousness. And look
at you! And look at me! You've had a few good moments, as for example at
the Turkish bath, but do you want a succession of such days? Could you
survive a succession of such days? Would you even care to acquire a
hundred and fifty thousand pounds every day? You have eaten too much and
drunk too much, and run too hard after pleasure, and been too much
bored, and met too many antipathetic people, and squandered too much
money, and set a thoroughly bad example to your family. You have been
happy only in spasms. Your health is good; you are cured of your malady.
Does that render you any more contented? It does not. You have
complicated your existence in the hope of improving it. But have you
improved it? No. You ought to simplify your existence. But will you? You
will not. All your strength of purpose will be needed to prevent still
further complications being woven into your existence. To inherit a
hundred thousand pounds was your misfortune. But deliberately to
increase the sum to a quarter of a million was your fault. You were
happier at the Treasury. You left the Treasury on account of illness.
You are not ill any more. Will you go back to the Treasury? No. You will
never go back, because your powerful commonsense tells you that to
return to the Treasury with an income of twenty thousand a year would be
grotesque. And rather than be grotesque you would suffer. Again,
rightly. Nothing is worse than to be grotesque."
"Further," said his mind, "you have started your son on a sinister
career of adventure that may end in calamity. You have ministered to
your daughter's latent frivolity. You have put temptations in the way of
your wife which she cannot withstand. You have developed yourself into a
waster. What is the remedy? Obviously to dispose of your money. But your
ladies would not permit you to do so and they are entitled to be heard
on the point. Moreover, how could you dispose of it? Not in charity,
because you are convinced of the grave social mischievousness of
charity. And not in helping any great social movement, because you are
not silly enough not to know that the lavishing of wealth never really
aids, but most viciously hinders, the proper evolution of a society. And
you cannot save your income and let it accumulate, because if you did
you would once again be tumbling into the grotesque; and you would,
further, be leaving to your successors a legacy of evil which no man is
justified in leaving to his successors. No! Your case is in practice
irremediable. Like the murderer on the scaffold, you are the victim of
circumstances. And not one human being in a million will pity you. You
are a living tragedy which only death can end."
During this disconcerting session Eve had been mysteriously engaged in
the boudoir. She now came into the dark bedroom.
"What?" she softly murmured, hearing Mr. Prohack's restlessness. "Not
asleep, darling?" She bent over him and kissed him and her kiss was even
softer, more soporific, than her voice. "Now do go to sleep."
And Mr. Prohack went to sleep, and his last waking thought was, with the
feel of the kiss on his nose (the poor woman had aimed badly in the
dark): "Anyway this tragedy has one compensation, of which a hundred
quarter of a millions can't deprive me."
CHAPTER XV
THE HEAVY FATHER
I
Within a few moments of his final waking up the next morning, Mr.
Prohack beheld Eve bending over him, the image of solicitude. She was
dressed for outdoor business.
"How do you feel?" she asked, in a tender tone that demanded to know the
worst at once.
"Why?" asked Mr. Prohack, thus with one word, and a smile to match,
criticising her tone.
"You looked so dreadfully tired last night. I did feel sorry for you,
darling. Don't you think you'd better stay in bed to-day?"
"Can you seriously suggest such a thing?" he cried. "What about my daily
programme if I stay in bed? I have undertaken to be idle, and nobody can
be scientifically idle in bed. I'm late already. Where's my breakfast?
Where are my newspapers? I must begin the day without the loss of
another moment. Please give me my dressing-gown."
"I very much wonder how your blood-pressure is," Eve complained.
"And you, I suppose, are perfectly well?"
"Oh, yes, I am. I'm absolutely cured. Dr. Veiga is really very
marvellous. But I always told you he was."
"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "What's sauce for the goose has to be sauce
for the gander. If you're perfectly well, so am I. You can't have the
monopoly of good health in this marriage. What's that pamphlet you've
got in your hand, my dove?"
"Oh! It's nothing. It's only about the League of all the Arts. Mr.
Morfey gave it to me."
"I suppose it was that pamphlet you were reading last night in the
boudoir instead of coming to bed. Eve, you're hiding something from me.
Where are you going to in such a hurry?"
"I'm not hiding anything, you silly boy.... I thought I'd just run along
and have a look at that house. You see, if it isn't at all the kind of
thing to suit us, me going first will save you the trouble of going."
"_What house?_" exclaimed Mr. Prohack with terrible emphasis.
"But Charlie told me he'd told you all about it," Eve protested
innocently.
"Charlie told you no such thing," Mr. Prohack contradicted her. "If he
told you anything at all, he merely told you that he'd mentioned a house
to me in the most casual manner."
Eve proceeded blandly:
"It's in Manchester Square, very handy for the Wallace Gallery, and you
know how fond you are of pictures. It's on sale, furniture and all; but
it can be rented for a year to see how it suits us. Of course it may not
suit us a bit. I understand it has some lovely rooms. Charlie says it
would be exactly the thing for big receptions."
"_Big receptions_! I shall have nothing to do with it. Now we've lost
our children even this house is too big for us. And I know what the
houses in Manchester Square are. You've said all your life you hate
receptions."
"So I do. They're so much trouble. But one never knows what may
happen...! And with plenty of servants...!"
"You understand me. I shall have nothing to do with it. Nothing!"
"Darling, please, please don't excite yourself. The decision will rest
entirely with you. You know I shouldn't dream of influencing you. As if
I could! However, I've promised to meet Charlie there this morning. So I
suppose I'd better go. Carthew is late with the car." She tapped her
foot. "And yet I specially told him to be here prompt."
"Well, considering the hour he brought us home, he's scarcely had time
to get into bed yet. He ought to have had the morning off."
"Why? A chauffeur's a chauffeur after all. They know what they have to
do. Besides, Carthew would do anything for me."
"Yes, that's you all over. You deliberately bewitch him, and then you
shamelessly exploit him. I shall compare notes with Carthew. I can give
him a useful tip or two about you."
"Oh! Here he is!" said Eve, who had been watching out of the window. "Au
revoir, my pet. Here's Machin with your breakfast and newspapers. I
daresay I shall be back before you're up. But don't count on me."
As he raised himself against pillows for the meal, after both she and
Machin had gone, Mr. Prohack remembered what his mind had said to him a
few hours earlier about fighting against further complications of his
existence, and he set his teeth and determined to fight hard.
Scarcely had he begun his breakfast when Eve returned, in a state of
excitement.
"There's a young woman downstairs waiting for you in the dining-room.
She wouldn't give her name to Machin, it seems, but she says she's your
new secretary. Apparently she recognised my car on the way from the
garage and stopped it and got into it; and then she found out she'd
forgotten something and the car had to go back with her to where she
lives, wherever that is, and that's why Carthew was late for _me_." Eve
delivered these sentences with a tremendous air of ordinariness, as
though they related quite usual events and disturbances, and as though
no wife could possibly see in them any matter for astonishment or
reproach. Such was one of her methods of making an effect.
Mr. Prohack collected himself. On several occasions during the previous
afternoon and evening he had meditated somewhat uneasily upon the
domestic difficulties which might inhere in this impulsive engagement of
Miss Winstock as a private secretary, but since waking up the affair had
not presented itself to his mind. He had indeed completely forgotten it.
"Who told you all this?" he asked warily.
"Well, she told Machin and Machin told me."
"Let me see now," said Mr. Prohack. "Yes. It's quite true. After
ordering a pair of braces yesterday morning, I did order a secretary.
She was recommended to me."
"You didn't say anything about it yesterday."
"My dove, had I a chance to do so? Had we a single moment together? And
you know how I was when we reached home, don't you?... You see, I always
had a secretary at the Treasury, and I feel sort of lost without one. So
I--"
"But, darling, _of course_! I always believe in letting you do exactly
as you like. It's the only way.... Au revoir, my pet. Charlie will be
frightfully angry with me." And then, at the door: "If she hasn't got
anything to do she can always see to the flowers for me. Perhaps when I
come back you'll introduce us."
As soon as he had heard the bang of the front-door Mr. Prohack rang his
bell.
"Machin, I understand that my secretary is waiting in the dining-room."
"Yes, sir."
"Ask her to take her things off and then bring her up here."
"Up here, sir?"
"That's right."
In seven movements of unimaginable stealthy swiftness Machin tidied the
worst disorders of the room and departed. Mr. Prohack continued his
breakfast.
Miss Winstock appeared with a small portable typewriter in her arms and
a notebook lodged on the typewriter. She was wearing a smart black skirt
and a smart white blouse with a high collar. In her unsullied freshness
of attire she somewhat resembled a stage secretary on a first night; she
might have been mistaken for a brilliant imitation of a real secretary.
II
"Good morning. So you're come," Mr. Prohack greeted her firmly.
"Good morning. Yes, Mr. Prohack."
"Well, put that thing down on a chair somewhere."
Machin also had entered the room. She handed a paper to Mr. Prohack.
"Mistress asked me to give you that, sir."
It was a lengthy description, typewritten, of a house in Manchester
Square.
"Pass me those matches, please," said Mr. Prohack to Mimi when they were
alone. "By the way, why wouldn't you give your name when you arrived?"
"Because I didn't know what it was."
"Didn't know what it was?"
"When I told you my Christian name yesterday you said it wouldn't do at
all, and I was never to mention it again. In the absence of definite
instructions about my surname I thought I had better pursue a cautious
policy of waiting. I've told the chauffeur that he will know my name in
due course and that until I tell him what it is he mustn't know it. I
was not sure whether you would wish the members of your household to
know that I'm the person who had a collision with your car. Mrs. Prohack
and I were both in a state of collapse after the accident, and I was
removed before she could see me. Therefore she did not recognise me this
morning. But on the other hand she has no doubt heard my name often
enough since the accident and would recognise _that_."
Mr. Prohack lit the first cigarette of the day.
"Why did you bring that typewriter?" he asked gravely.
"It's mine. I thought that if you didn't happen to have one here it
might be useful. It was the typewriter that the car had to go back for.
I'd forgotten it. I can take it away again. But if you like you can
either buy it or hire it from, me."
The girl could not have guessed it from his countenance, but Mr. Prohack
was thunderstruck. She was bringing forward considerations which
positively had not presented themselves to him. That she had much
initiative was clear from her conduct of the previous day. She now
disclosed a startling capacity for intrigue. Mr. Prohack, however, was
not intimidated. The experience of an official life had taught him the
value of taciturnity, and moreover a comfortable feeling of satisfaction
stole over him as he realised that once again he had a secretary under
his thumb. He seemed to be delightfully resuming the habits which
ill-health had so ruthlessly broken.
"Mary Warburton," said he at length.
"Certainly," said she. "I'll tell your chauffeur."
"The initials will correspond--in case--"
"Yes," said she. "I'd noticed that."
"We will see what your typewriting machine is capable of, and then I'll
decide about it."
"Certainly."
"Please take down some letters."
"Mr. Carrel Quire always told me what he wanted said, and I wrote the
letters myself."
"That is very interesting," said Mr. Prohack. "Perhaps you can manage to
sit at the dressing-table. Mind that necklace there. It's supposed to be
rather valuable. Put it in the case, and put the case in the middle
drawer."
"Don't you keep it in a safe?" said Miss Warburton, obeying.
"All questions about necklaces should be addressed direct to Mrs.
Prohack."
"I prefer to take down on my knee," said Miss Warburton, opening her
notebook, "if I am to take down."
"You are. Now. 'Dear Madam. I am requested by my Lords of the Treasury
to forward to you the enclosed cheque for one hundred pounds for your
Privy Purse.' New line. 'I am also to state that no account of
expenditure will be required.' New line. 'Be good enough to acknowledge
receipt. Your obedient servant. To Miss Prohack, Grand Babylon Hotel.'
Got it? 'Dear Sir. With reference to the action instituted by your
company against Miss Mimi Winstock, and to my claim against your company
under my accident policy. I have seen the defendant. She had evidently
behaved in an extremely foolish not to say criminal way; but as the
result of a personal appeal from her I have decided to settle the matter
privately. Please therefore accept this letter as a release from all
your liabilities to me, and also as my personal undertaking to pay all
the costs of the action on both sides. Yours faithfully. Secretary,
World's Car Insurance Corporation.' Wipe your eyes, wipe your eyes, Miss
Warburton. You're wetting the notebook."
"I was only crying because you're so kind. I know I _did_ behave in a
criminal way."
"Just so, Miss Warburton. But it will be more convenient for me and for
you too if you can arrange to cry in your own time and not in mine." And
he continued to address her, in his own mind: "Don't think I haven't
noticed your aspiring nose and your ruthless little lips and your gift
for conspiracy and your wonderful weakness for tears! And don't confuse
me with Mr. Carrel Quire, because we're two quite different people!
You've got to be useful to me." And in a more remote part of his mind,
he continued still further: "You're quite a decent sort of child, only
you've been spoilt. I'll unspoil you. You've taken your first medicine
rather well. I like you, or I shall like you before I've done with you."
Miss Warburton wiped her eyes.
"You understand," Mr. Prohack proceeded aloud, "that you're engaged as
my confidential secretary. And when I say 'confidential' I mean
'confidential' in the fullest sense."
"Oh, quite," Miss Warburton concurred almost passionately.
"And you aren't anybody else's secretary but mine. You may pretend to be
everybody else's secretary, you may pretend as much as you please--it
may even be advisable to do so--but the fact must always remain that you
are mine alone. You have to protect my interests, and let me warn you
that my interests are sometimes very strange, not to say peculiar. Get
well into your head that there are not ten commandments in my service.
There is only one: to watch over my interests, to protect them against
everybody else in the whole world. In return for a living wage, you give
me the most absolute loyalty, a loyalty which sticks at nothing,
nothing, nothing."
"Oh, Mr. Prohack!" replied Mary Warburton, smiling simply. "You needn't
tell me all that. I entirely understand. It's the usual thing for
confidential secretaries, isn't it?"
"And now," Mr. Prohack went on, ignoring her. "This being made perfectly
clear, go into the boudoir--that's the room through there--and bring me
here all the parcels lying about. Our next task is to check the
accuracy of several of the leading tradesmen in the West End."
"I think there are one or two more parcels that have been delivered this
morning, in the hall," said Miss Warburton. "Perhaps I had better fetch
them."
"Perhaps you had."
In a few minutes, Miss Warburton, by dint of opening parcels, had
transformed the bedroom into a composite of the principal men's shops in
Piccadilly and Bond Street. Mr. Prohack recoiled before the chromatic
show and also before the prospect of Eve's views on the show.
"Take everything into the boudoir," said he, "and arrange them under the
sofa. It's important that we should not lose our heads in this crisis.
When you go out to lunch you will buy some foolscap paper and this
afternoon you will make a schedule of the goods, divided according to
the portions of the human frame which they are intended to conceal or
adorn. What are you laughing at, Miss Warburton?"
"You are so amusing, Mr. Prohack."
"I may be amusing, but I am not susceptible to the flattery of giggling.
Endeavour not to treat serious subjects lightly."
"I don't see any boots."
"Neither do I. You will telephone to the bootmaker's, and to my
tailor's; also to Sir Paul Spinner and Messrs. Smathe and Smathe. But
before that I will just dictate a few more letters."
"Certainly."
When he had finished dictating, Mr. Prohack said:
"I shall now get up. Go downstairs and ask Machin--that's the
parlourmaid--to show you the breakfast-room. The breakfast-room is
behind the dining-room, and is so called because it is never employed
for breakfast. It exists in all truly London houses, and is perfectly
useless in all of them except those occupied by dentists, who use it for
their beneficent labours in taking things from, or adding things to, the
bodies of their patients. The breakfast-room in this house will be the
secretary's room--your room if you continue to give me satisfaction.
Remove that typewriting machine from here, and arrange your room
according to your desire.... And I say, Miss Warburton."
"Yes, Mr. Prohack," eagerly responded the secretary, pausing at the
door.
"Yesterday I gave you a brief outline of your duties. But I omitted one
exceedingly important item--almost as important as not falling in love
with my son. You will have to keep on good terms with Machin. Machin is
indispensable and irreplaceable. I could get forty absolutely loyal
secretaries while my wife was unsuccessfully searching for another
Machin."
"I have an infallible way with parlourmaids," said Miss Warburton.
"What is that?"
"I listen to their grievances and to their love-affairs."
Mr. Prohack, though fatigued, felt himself to be inordinately well, and
he divined that this felicity was due to the exercise of dancing on the
previous night, following upon the Turkish bath. He had not felt so well
for many years. He laughed to himself at intervals as he performed his
toilette, and knew not quite why. His secretary was just like a new toy
to him, offering many of the advantages of official life and routine
without any of the drawbacks. At half past eleven he descended, wearing
one or two of the more discreet of his new possessions, and with the
sensation of having already transacted a good day's work, into the
breakfast-room and found Miss Warburton and Machin in converse. Machin
feverishly poked the freshly-lit fire and then, pretending to have
urgent business elsewhere, left the room.
"Here are some particulars of a house in Manchester Square," said Mr.
Prohack. "Please read them."
Miss Warburton complied.
"It seems really very nice," said she. "Very nice indeed."
"Does it? Now listen to me. That house is apparently the most practical
and the most beautiful house in London. Judging from the description, it
deserves to be put under a glass-case in a museum and labelled 'the
ideal house.' There is no fault to be found with that house, and I
should probably take it at once but for one point. I don't want it. I do
not want it. Do I make myself clear? I have no use for it whatever."
"Then you've inspected it."
"I have not. But I don't want it. Now a determined effort will shortly
be made to induce me to take that house. I will not go into details or
personalities. I say merely that a determined effort will shortly be
made to force me to act against my will and my wishes. This effort must
be circumvented. In a word, the present is a moment when I may need the
unscrupulous services of an utterly devoted confidential secretary."
"What am I to do?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. All I know is that my existence must not
on any account be complicated, and that the possession of that house
would seriously complicate it."
"Will you leave the matter to me, Mr. Prohack?"
"What shall you do?"
"Wouldn't it be better for you not to know what I should do?" Miss
Warburton glanced at him oddly. Her glance was agreeable, and yet
disconcerting. The attractiveness of the young woman seemed to be
accentuated. The institution of the confidential secretary was
magnified, in the eyes of Mr. Prohack, into one of the greatest
achievements of human society.
"Not at all," said he, in reply. "You are under-rating my capabilities,
for I can know and not know simultaneously."
"Well," said Miss Warburton. "You can't take an old house without having
the drains examined, obviously. Supposing the report on the drains was
unfavourable?"
"Do you propose to tamper with the drains?"
"Certainly not. I shouldn't dream of doing anything so disgraceful. But
I might tamper with the surveyor who made the report on the drains."
"Say no more," Mr. Prohack adjured her. "I'm going out."
And he went out, though he had by no means finished instructing Miss
Warburton in the art of being his secretary. She did not even know where
to find the essential tools of her calling, nor yet the names of
tradesmen to whom she had to telephone. He ought to have stayed in if
only to present his secretary to his wife. But he went out--to reflect
in private upon her initiative, her ready resourcefulness, her great
gift for conspiracy. He had to get away from her. The thought of her
induced in him qualms of trepidation. Could he after all manage her?
What a loss would she be to Mr. Carrel Quire! Nevertheless she was
capable of being foolish. It was her foolishness that had transferred
her from Mr. Carrel Quire to himself.
III
Mr. Prohack went out because he was drawn out, by the force of an
attraction which he would scarcely avow even to himself,--a mysterious
and horrible attraction which, if he had been a logical human being like
the rest of us, ought to have been a repulsion for him.
And as he was walking abroad in the pleasant foggy sunshine of the West
End streets, a plutocratic idler with nothing to do but yield to strange
impulses, he saw on a motor-bus the placard of a financial daily paper
bearing the line: "The Latest Oil Coup." He immediately wanted to buy
that paper. As a London citizen he held the opinion that whenever he
wanted a thing he ought to be able to buy it at the next corner. Yet now
he looked in every direction but could see no symptom of a newspaper
shop anywhere. The time was morning--for the West End it was early
morning--and there were newsboys on the pavements, but by a curious
anomaly they were selling evening and not morning newspapers. Daringly
he asked one of these infants for the financial daily; the infant
sniggered and did no more. Another directed him to a shop up an alley
off the Edgware Road. The shopman doubted the existence of any such
financial daily as Mr. Prohack indicated, apparently attaching no
importance to the fact that it was advertised on every motor-bus
travelling along the Edgware Road, but he suggested that if it did
exist, it might just conceivably be purchased at the main bookstall at
Paddington Station. Determined to obtain the paper at all costs, Mr.
Prohack stopped a taxi-cab and drove to Paddington, squandering
eighteenpence on the journey, and reflecting as he rolled forward upon
the primitiveness of a so-called civilisation in which you could not buy
a morning paper in the morning without spending the whole morning over
the transaction--and reflecting also upon the disturbing fact that after
one full day of its practice, his scheme of scientific idleness had gone
all to bits. He got the paper, and read therein a very exciting account
of Sir Paul Spinner's deal in oil-lands. The amount of Paul's profit was
not specified, but readers were given to understand that it was enormous
and that Paul had successfully bled the greatest Oil Combine in the
world. The article, though discreet and vague in phraseology, was well
worth a line on any placard. It had cost Mr. Prohack the price of a
complete Shakespere, but he did not call it dear. He threw the paper
away with a free optimistic gesture of delight. Yes, he had wisely put
his trust in old Paul and he was veritably a rich man--one who could
look down on mediocre fortunes of a hundred thousand pounds or so.
Civilisation was not so bad after all.
Then the original attraction which had drawn him out of the house
resumed its pull.... Why did his subconscious feet take him in the
direction of Manchester Square? True, the Wallace Collection of pictures
is to be found at Hertford House, Manchester Square, and Mr. Prohack had
always been interested in pictures! Well, if he did happen to find
himself in Manchester Square he might perhaps glance at the exterior of
the dwelling which his son desired to plant upon him and his wife
desired him to be planted with.... It was there right enough. It had not
been spirited away in the night hours. He recognised the number. An
enormous house; the largest in the Square after Hertford House. Over
its monumental portico was an enormous sign, truthfully describing it as
"this noble mansion." As no automobile stood at the front-door Mr.
Prohack concluded that his wife's visit of inspection was over.
Doubtless she was seeking him at home at that moment to the end of
persuading him by her soft, unscrupulous arts to take the noble mansion.
The front-door was ajar. Astounding carelessness on the part of the
caretaker! Mr. Prohack's subconscious legs carried him into the house.
The interior was amazing. Mr. Prohack had always been interested, not
only in pictures, but in furniture. Pictures and furniture might have
been called the weakness to which his circumstances had hitherto
compelled him to be too strong to yield. He knew a good picture, and he
knew a good piece of furniture, when he saw them. The noble mansion was
full of good pictures and good furniture. Evidently it had been the home
of somebody who had both fine tastes and the means to gratify them. And
the place was complete. Nothing had been removed, and nothing had been
protected against the grimy dust of London. The occupiers might have
walked out of it a few hours earlier. The effect of dark richness in the
half-shuttered rooms almost overwhelmed Mr. Prohack. Nobody preventing,
he climbed the beautiful Georgian staircase, which was carpeted with a
series of wondrous Persian carpets laid end to end. A woman in a black
apron appeared in the hall from the basement, gazed at Mr. Prohack's
mounting legs, and said naught. On the first-floor was the drawing-room,
a magnificent apartment exquisitely furnished in Louis Quinze. Mr.
Prohack blenched. He had expected nothing half so marvellous. Was it
possible that he could afford to take this noble mansion and live in it?
It was more than possible; it was sure.
Mr. Prohack had a foreboding of a wild, transient impulse to take it.
The impulse died ere it was born. No further complications of his
existence were to be permitted; he would fight against them to the last
drop of his blood. And the complications incident to residence in such
an abode would be enormous. Still, he thought that he might as well see
the whole house, and he proceeded upstairs, wondering how many people
there were in London who possessed the taste to make, and the money to
maintain, such a home. Even the stairs from the first to the second
floor, were beautiful, having a lovely carpet, lovely engravings on the
walls, and a delightful balustrade. On the second-floor landing were two
tables covered with objects of art, any of which Mr. Prohack might have
pocketed and nobody the wiser; the carelessness that left the place
unguarded was merely prodigious.
Mr. Prohack heard a sound; it might have been the creak of a floor-board
or the displacement of a piece of furniture. Startled, he looked through
a half-open door into a small room. He could see an old gilt mirror over
a fire-place; and in the mirror the images of the upper portions of a
young man and a young woman. The young woman was beyond question Sissie
Prohack. The young man, he decided after a moment of hesitation--for he
could distinguish only a male overcoated back in the glass--was Oswald
Morfey. The images were very close together. They did not move. Then Mr.
Prohack overheard a whisper, but did not catch its purport. Then the
image of the girl's face began to blush; it went redder and redder, and
the crimson seemed to flow downwards until the exposed neck blushed
also. A marvellous and a disconcerting spectacle. Mr. Prohack felt that
he himself was blushing. Then the two images blended, and the girl's
head and hat seemed to be agitated as by a high wind. And then both
images moved out of the field of the mirror.
The final expression on the girl's face as it vanished was one of the
most exquisite things that Mr. Prohack had ever witnessed. It brought
the tears to his eyes. Nevertheless he was shocked.
His mind ran:
"That fellow has kissed my daughter, and he has kissed her for the first
time. It is monstrous that any girl, and especially my daughter, should
be kissed for the first time. I have not been consulted, and I had not
the slightest idea that matters had gone so far. Her mother has probably
been here, with Charlie, and gone off leaving these doves together.
Culpable carelessness on her part. Talk about mothers! No father would
have been guilty of such negligence. The affair must be stopped. It
amounts to an outrage."
A peculiar person, Mr. Prohack! No normal father could have had such
thoughts. Mr. Prohack could of course have burst in upon the pair and
smashed an idyll to fragments. But instead of doing so he turned away
from the idyll and descended the stairs as stealthily as he could.
Nobody challenged his exit. In the street he breathed with relief as if
he had escaped from a house of great peril; but he did not feel safe
until he had lost himself in the populousness of Oxford Street.
"For social and family purposes," he reflected, "I have not seen that
kiss. I cannot possibly tell them, or tell anybody, that I spied upon
their embrace. To put myself right I ought to have called out a greeting
the very instant I spotted them. But I did not call out a greeting. By
failing to do so I put myself in a false position.... How shall I get
official news of that kiss? Shall I ever get news of it?"
He had important business to transact with tradesmen. He could not do
it. On leaving home he had not decided whether he would lunch
domestically or at the Grand Babylon. He now perceived that he could do
neither. He would lunch at one of his clubs. No! He could not bring
himself to lunch at either club. He could face nobody. He resembled a
man who was secretly carrying a considerable parcel of high explosive.
He wandered until he could wander no more, and then he entered a
tea-shop that was nearly full of young girls. It was a new world to him.
He saw "Mutton pie 8d" on the menu and ordered it haphazard. He
discovered to his astonishment that he was hungry. Having eaten the
mutton pie, he ordered a second one, and ate it. The second mutton pie
seemed to endow the eater with the faculty of vision--a result which
perhaps no other mutton pie had ever before in the whole annals of
eating achieved. He felt much better. He was illuminated by a large,
refreshing wisdom, which thus expressed itself in his excited brain:
"After all, I suppose it's not the first or the only instance of a girl
being kissed by a man. Similar incidents must occur quite often in the
history of the human race."
IV
When he returned home his house seemed to be pitiably small, cramped,
and lacking in rich ornament; it seemed to be no sort of a house for a
man with twenty thousand a year. But he was determined to love his house
at all costs, and never to leave it. The philosopher within himself told
him that happiness does not spring from large houses built with hands.
And his own house was bright that afternoon; he felt as soon as he
entered it that it was more bright than usual. The reason was
immediately disclosed. Sissie was inside it. She had come for some
belongings and to pay a visit to her mother.
"My word!" she greeted her father in the drawing-room, where she was
strumming while Eve leaned lovingly on the piano. "My word! We are fine
with our new private secretary!"
Not a sign on that girl's face, nor in her demeanour, that she had an
amorous secret, that something absolutely unprecedented had happened to
her only a few hours earlier! The duplicity of women astonished even the
philosopher in Mr. Prohack.
"Will she mention it or won't she?" Mr. Prohack asked himself; and then
began to equal Sissie in duplicity by demanding of his women in a tone
of raillery what they thought of the new private secretary. He reflected
that he might as well know the worst at once.
"She'll do," said Sissie gaily, and Eve said: "She seems very willing to
oblige."
"Ah!" Mr. Prohack grew alert. "She's been obliging you already, has
she?"
"Well," said Eve. "It was about the new house--"
"What new house?"
"But you know, darling. Charlie mentioned it to you last night, and I
told you that I was going to look at it this morning."
"Oh! _That_!" Mr. Prohack ejaculated disdainfully.
"I've seen it. I've been all over it, and it's simply lovely. I never
saw anything equal to it."
"Of course!"
"And so cheap!"
"Of course!"
"But it's ripping, dad, seriously."
"Seriously ripping, it is? Well, so far as I am concerned I shall let it
rip."
"I rushed back here as soon as I'd seen it," Eve proceeded, quietly
ignoring the last remark. "But you'd gone out without saying where.
Nobody knew where you'd gone. It was very awkward, because if we want
this house we've got to decide at once--at latest in three days, Charlie
says. Miss Warburton--that's her name, isn't it?--Miss Warburton had a
very bright idea. She seems to know quite a lot about property. She
thought of the drains. She said the first thing would be to have the
drains inspected, and that if there was any hurry the surveyors ought to
be instructed instantly. She knew some surveyor people, and so she's
gone out to see the agents and get permission from them for the
surveyors to inspect, and she'll see the surveyors at the same time. She
says we ought to have the report by to-morrow afternoon. She's very
enterprising."
The enterprisingness of Miss Warburton frightened Mr. Prohack. She had
acted exactly as he would have wished--only better; evidently she was
working out his plot against the house in the most efficient manner.
Yet he was frightened. So much so that he could find nothing to say
except: "Indeed!"
"You never told me she used to be with Mr. Carrel Quire and is related
to the Paulle family," observed Eve, mingling a mild reproach with
joyous vivacity, as if saying: "Why did you keep this titbit from me?"
"I must now have a little repose," said Mr. Prohack.
"We'll leave you," Eve said, eager to be agreeable. "You must be tired,
you poor dear. I'm just going out to shop with Sissie. I'm not sure if I
shall be in for tea, but I will be if you think you'll be lonely."
"Did you do much entertaining at lunch, young woman?" Mr. Prohack asked.
"Charlie had several people--men--but I really don't know who they were.
And Ozzie Morfey came. And permit me to inform you that Charlie was
simply knocked flat by my qualities as a hostess. Do you know what he
said to me afterwards? He said: 'That lunch was a bit of all right,
kid.' Enormous from Charlie, wasn't it?"
Mother and daughter went out arm in arm like two young girls. Beyond
question they were highly pleased with themselves and the world. Eve
returned after a moment.
"Are you comfortable, dear? I've told Machin you mustn't on any account
be disturbed. Charlie's borrowed the car. We shall get a taxi in the
Bayswater Road." She bent down and seemed to bury her soft lips in his
cheek. She was beginning to have other interests than himself. And since
she had nothing now to worry about, in a maternal sense, she had become
a child. She was fat--at any rate nobody could describe her as less than
plump--and over forty, but a child, an exquisite child. He magnificently
let her kiss him. However, he knew that she knew that she was his sole
passion. She whispered most intimately and persuasively into his ear:
"Shall we have a look at that house to-morrow morning, just you and I?
You'll love the furniture."
"Perhaps," he replied. What else could he reply? He very much desired to
have a talk with her about Sissie and the fellow Morfey; but he could
not broach the subject because he could not tell her in cold blood that
he had seen Sissie in Morfey's arms. To do so would have an effect like
setting fire to the home. Unless, of course, Sissie had already confided
in her mother? Was it conceivable that Eve had a secret from him? It was
certainly conceivable that he had a secret from Eve. Not only was he
hiding from her his knowledge of the startling development in the
relations between Sissie and Morfey,--he had not even told her that he
had seen the house in Manchester Square. He was leading a double
life,--consequence of riches! Was she?
As soon as she had softly closed the door he composed himself, for he
was in fact considerably exhausted. Remembering a conversation at the
club with a celebrated psycho-analyst about the possibilities of
auto-suggestion, he strove to empty his mind and then to repeat to
himself very rapidly in a low murmur: "You will sleep, you will sleep,
you will sleep, you will sleep," innumerable times. But the incantation
would not work, probably because he could not keep his mind empty. The
mysterious receptacle filled faster than he could empty it. It filled
till it flowed over with the flooding realisation of the awful
complexity of existence. He longed to maintain its simplicity, well
aware that his happiness would result from simplicity alone. But
existence flatly refused to be simple. He desired love in a cottage with
Eve. He could have bought a hundred cottages, all in ideal surroundings.
The mere fact, however, that he was in a position to buy a hundred
cottages somehow made it impossible for him to devote himself
exclusively to loving Eve in one cottage....
His imagination leaped over intervening events and he pictured the
wedding of Sissie as a nightmare of complications--no matter whom she
married. He loathed weddings. Of course a girl of Sissie's sense and
modernity ought to insist on being married in a registry office. But
would she? She would not. For a month previous to marriage all girls
cast off modernity and became Victorian. Yes, she would demand real
orange-blossom and everything that went with it.... He got as far as
wishing that Sissie might grow into an old maid, solely that he might be
spared the wearing complications incident to the ceremony of marriage as
practised by intelligent persons in the twentieth century. His character
was deteriorating, and he could not stop it from deteriorating....
Then Sissie herself came very silently into the room.
"Sit down, my dear. I want to talk to you," he said in his most
ingratiating and sympathetic tones. And in quite another tone he
addressed her silently: "It's time I taught you a thing or two, my
wench."
"Yes, father," she responded charmingly to his wily ingratiatingness,
and sat down.
"If you were the ordinary girl," he began, "I shouldn't say a word. It
would be no use. But you aren't. And I flatter myself I'm not the
ordinary father. You are in love. Or you think you are. Which is the
same thing--for the present. It's a fine thing to be in love. I'm quite
serious. I like you tremendously just for being in love. Yes, I do. Now
I know something about being in love. You've got enough imagination to
realise that, and I want you to realise it. I want you to realise that I
know a bit more about love than you do. Stands to reason, doesn't it?"
"Yes, father," said Sissie, placidly respectful.
"Love has got one drawback. It very gravely impairs the critical
faculty. You think you can judge our friend Oswald with perfect
impartiality. You think you see him as he is. But if you will exercise
your imagination you will admit that you can't. You perceive that, don't
you?"
"Quite, dad," the adorable child concurred.
"Well, do you know anything about him, really?"
"Not much, father."
"Neither do I. I've nothing whatever against him. But I shouldn't be
playing straight with you if I didn't tell you that at the club he's not
greatly admired. And a club is a very good judge of a man, the best
judge of a man. And then as regards his business. Supposing you were not
in love with him, should you like his business? You wouldn't. Naturally.
There are other things, but I won't discuss them now. All I suggest to
you is that you should go a bit slow. Exercise caution. Control
yourself. Test him a little. If you and I weren't the greatest pals I
shouldn't be such an ass as to talk in this strain to you. But I know
you won't misunderstand me. I know you know there's absolutely no
conventional nonsense about me, just as I know there's absolutely no
conventional nonsense about you. I'm perfectly aware that the old can't
teach the young, and that oftener than not the young are right and the
old wrong. But it's not a question of old and young between you and me.
It's a question of two friends--that's all."
"Dad," said she, "you're the most wonderful dad that ever was. Oh! If
everybody would talk like that!"
"Not at all! Not at all!" he deprecated, delighted with himself and her.
"I'm simply telling you what you know already. I needn't say any more.
You'll do exactly as you think best, and whatever you do will please me.
I don't want you to be happy in my way--I want you to be happy in your
own way. Possibly you'll decide to tell Mr. Morfey to wait for three
months."
"I most decidedly shall, dad," Sissie interrupted him, "and I'm most
frightfully obliged to you."
He had always held that she was a marvellous girl, and here was the
proof. He had spoken with the perfection of tact and sympathy and
wisdom, but his success astonished him. At this point he perceived that
Sissie was not really sitting in the chair at all and that the chair was
empty. So that the exhibition of sagacity had been entirely wasted.
"Anyhow I've had a sleep," said the philosopher in him.
The door opened. Machin appeared, defying her mistress's orders.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but a Mr. Morfey is on the telephone and
asks whether it would be convenient for you to see him to-night. He says
it's urgent." Mr. Prohack braced himself, but where his stomach had been
there was a void.
V
"Had an accident to your eye-glass?" asked Mr. Prohack, shaking hands
with Oswald Morfey, when the latter entered, by appointment, Mr.
Prohack's breakfast-room after dinner. Miss Warburton having gone home,
Mr. Prohack had determined to employ her official room for formal
interviews. With her woman's touch she had given it an air of business
which pleasantly reminded him of the Treasury.
Ozzie was not wearing an eye-glass, and the absence of the broad black
ribbon that usually ran like a cable-connection between his eye and his
supra-umbilical region produced the disturbing illusion that he had
forgotten an essential article of attire.
"Yes," Ozzie replied, opening his eyes with that mien of surprise that
was his response to all questions, even the simplest. "Miss Sissie has
cracked it."
"I'm very sorry my daughter should be so clumsy."
"It was not exactly clumsiness. I offered her the eye-glass to do what
she pleased with, and she pleased to break it."
"Surely an impertinence?"
"No. A favour. Miss Sissie did not care for my eye-glass."
"You must be considerably incommoded."
"No. The purpose of my eye-glass was decorative, not optical." Ozzie
smiled agreeably, though nervously.
Mr. Prohack was conscious of a certain surprising sympathy for this
chubby simpering young man with the peculiar vocation, whom but lately
he had scorned and whom on one occasion he had described as a perfect
ass.
"Well, shall we sit down?" suggested the elder, whom the younger's
nervousness had put into an excellent state of easy confidence.
"The fact is," said Ozzie, obeying, "the fact is that I've come to see
you about Sissie. I'm very anxious to marry her, Mr. Prohack."
"Indeed! Then you must excuse this old velvet coat. If I'd had notice of
the solemnity of your visit, my dear Morfey, I'd have met you in a
dinner jacket. May I just put one question? Have you kissed Sissie
already?"
"I--er--have."
"By force or by mutual agreement?"
"Neither."
"She made no protest?"
"No."
"The reverse rather?"
"Yes."
"Then why do you come here to me?"
"To get your consent."
"I suppose you arranged with Sissie that you should come here?"
"Yes, I did. We thought it would be best if I came alone."
"Well, all I can say is that you're a very old-fashioned pair. I'm
afraid that you must have forgotten to alter your date calendar when the
twentieth century started. Let me assure you that this is not by any
means the nineteenth. I admit that I only altered my own date calendar
this afternoon, and even then only as the result of an unusual dream."
"Yes?" said Ozzie politely, and he said nothing else, but it seemed to
Mr. Prohack that Ozzie was thinking: "This queer old stick is taking
advantage of his position to make a fool of himself in his queer old
way."
"Let us examine the circumstances," Mr. Prohack proceeded. "You want to
marry Sissie. Therefore you respect her. Therefore you would not have
invited her to marry unless you had been reasonably sure that you
possessed the brains and the material means to provide for her physical
and moral comfort not merely during the next year but till the end of
her life. It would be useless, not to say impolite, for me to question
you as to your situation and your abilities, because you are convinced
about both, and if you failed to convince me about both you would leave
here perfectly sure that the fault was mine and not yours, and you would
pursue your plans just the same. Moreover, you are a man of the
world--far more a man of the world than I am myself--and you are
unquestionably the best judge of your powers to do your duty towards a
wife. Of course some might argue that I, being appreciably older than
you, am appreciably wiser than you and that my opinion on vital matters
is worth more than yours. But you know, and perhaps I know too, that in
growing old a man does not really become wiser; he simply acquires a
different sort of wisdom--whether it is a better or a worse sort nobody
can decide. All we know is that the extremely young and the extremely
old are in practice generally foolish. Which leads you nowhere at all.
But looking at history we perceive that the ideas of the moderately
young have always triumphed against the ideas of the moderately old. And
happily so, for otherwise there could be no progress. Hence the balance
of probability is that, assuming you and I were to differ, you would be
more right than I should be."
"But I hope that we do not differ, sir," said Ozzie. And Mr. Prohack
found satisfaction in the naturalness, the freedom from pose, of Ozzie's
diffident and disconcerted demeanour. His sympathy for the young man was
increased by the young man's increasing consternation.
"Again," resumed Mr. Prohack, ignoring Ozzie's hope. "Take the case of
Sissie herself. Sissie's education was designed and superintended by
myself. The supreme aim of education should be to give sound judgment in
the great affairs of life, and moral stamina to meet the crises which
arrive when sound judgment is falsified by events. If I were to tell you
that in my opinion Sissie's judgment of you as a future husband was
unsound, it would be equivalent to admitting that my education of Sissie
had been unsound. And I could not possibly admit such a thing. Moreover,
just as you are a man of the world, so Sissie is a woman of the world.
By heredity and by natural character she is sagacious, and she has
acquainted herself with all manner of things as to which I am entirely
ignorant. Nor can I remember any instance of her yielding, from genuine
conviction, to my judgment when it was opposed to hers. From all which
it follows, my dear Morfey, that your mission to me here this evening is
a somewhat illogical, futile, and unnecessary mission, and that the
missioner must be either singularly old-fashioned and conventional--or
laughing in his sleeve at me. No!" Mr. Prohack with a nineteenth century
wave of the hand deprecated Ozzie's interrupting protest. "No! There is
a third alternative, and I accept it. You desired to show me a courtesy.
I thank you."
"But have you no questions to ask me?" demanded Ozzie.
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "How did you first make the acquaintance of my
daughter?"
"Do you mean to say you don't know? Hasn't Sissie ever told you?"
"Never. What is more, she has never mentioned your name in any
conversation until somebody else had mentioned it. Such is the result of
my educational system, and the influence of the time-spirit."
"Well, I'm dashed!" exclaimed Ozzie sincerely.
"I hope not, Morfey. I hope not, if by dashed you mean 'damned.'"
"But it was the most wonderful meeting, Mr. Prohack," Ozzie burst out,
and he was in such an enthusiasm that he almost forgot to lisp. "You
knew I was in M.I. in the war, after my trench fever."
"M.I., that is to say, Secret Service."
"Yes. Secret Service if you like. Well, sir, I was doing some work in
the East End, in a certain foreign community, and I had to get away
quickly, and so I jumped into a motor-van that happened to be passing.
That van was driven by Sissie!"
"An example of fact imitating fiction!" remarked Mr. Prohack, seeking,
not with complete success, to keep out of his voice the emotion
engendered in him by Ozzie's too brief recital. "Now that's one
question, and you have answered it brilliantly. My second and last
question is this: Are you in love with Sissie--"
"Please, Mr. Prohack!" Ozzie half rose out of his chair.
"Or do you love her? The two things are very different."
"I beg your pardon, sir. I hadn't quite grasped," said Ozzie
apologetically, subsiding. "I quite see what you mean. I'm both."
"You are a wonder!" Mr. Prohack murmured.
"Anyway, sir, I'm glad you don't object to our engagement."
"My dear Oswald," said Mr. Prohack in a new tone. "Do you imagine that
after my daughter had expressed her view of you by kissing you I could
fail to share that view. You have a great opinion of Sissie, but I doubt
whether your opinion of her is greater than mine. We will now have a
little whiskey together."
Ozzie's chubby face shone as in his agreeable agitation he searched for
the eye-glass ribbon that was not there.
"Well, sir," said he, beaming. "This interview has not been at all like
what I expected."
"Nor like what I expected either," said Mr. Prohack. "But who can
foresee the future?" And he added to himself: "Could I foresee when I
called this youth a perfect ass that in a very short time I should be
receiving him, not unpleasantly, as a prospective son-in-law? Life is
marvellous."
At the same moment Mrs. Prohack entered the room.
"Oh!" cried she, affecting to be surprised at the presence of Ozzie.
"Wife!" said Mr. Prohack, "Mr. Oswald Morfey has done you the honour to
solicit the hand of your daughter in marriage. You are staggered!
"How ridiculous you are, Arthur!" said Mrs. Prohack, and impulsively
kissed Ozzie.
VI
The wedding festivities really began the next evening with a family
dinner to celebrate Sissie's betrothal. The girl arrived magnificent
from the Grand Babylon, escorted by her lover, and found Mrs. Prohack
equally magnificent--indeed more magnificent by reason of the pearl
necklace. It seemed to Mr. Prohack that Eve had soon become quite used
to that marvellous necklace; he had already had to chide her for leaving
it about. Ozzie also was magnificent; even lacking his eye-glass and
ribbon he was magnificent. Mr. Prohack, esteeming that a quiet domestic
meal at home demanded no ceremony, had put on his old velvet, but Eve
had sharply corrected his sense of values--so shrewishly indeed that
nobody would have taken her for the recent recipient of a marvellous
necklace at his hands--and he had yielded to the extent of a
dinner-jacket. Charlie had not yet come. Since the previous afternoon he
had been out of town on mighty enterprises, but Sissie had seen him
return to the hotel before she left it, and he was momently expected.
Mr. Prohack perceived that Eve was treating Ozzie in advance as her son,
and Ozzie was responding heartily: a phenomenon which Mr. Prohack in
spite of himself found agreeable. Sissie showed more reserve than her
mother towards Ozzie; but then Sissie was a proud thing, which Eve never
was. Mr. Prohack admitted privately that he was happy--yes, he was happy
in the betrothal, and he had most solemnly announced and declared that
he would have naught to do with the wedding beyond giving a marriage
gift to his daughter and giving his daughter to Ozzie. And when Sissie
said that as neither she nor Ozzie had much use for the state of being
merely engaged the wedding would occur very soon, Mr. Prohack rejoiced
at the prospect of the upset being so quickly over. After the emotions
and complications of the wedding he would settle down to
simplicity,--luxurious possibly, but still simplicity: the plain but
perfect. And let his fortune persist in accumulating, well it must
accumulate and be hanged to it!
"But what about getting a house?" he asked his daughter.
"Oh, we shall live in Ozzie's flat," said Sissie.
"Won't it be rather small?"
"The smaller the better," said Sissie. "It will match our income."
"Oh, my dear girl," Eve protested, with a glance at Mr. Prohack to
indicate that for the asking Sissie could have all the income she
wanted. "And I'll give you an idea," Eve brightly added. "You can have
_this_ house rent free."
Sissie shook her head.
"Don't make so sure that they can have this house," said Mr. Prohack.
"But, Arthur! You've agreed to go and look at Manchester Square! And
it's all ready excepting the servants. I'm told that if you don't want
less than seven servants, including one or two menservants, there's no
difficulty about servants at all. I shall be very disappointed if we
don't have the wedding from Manchester Square."
Mr. Prohack writhed, though he knew himself safe. Seven servants; two
menservants? No! And again no! No complications!
"I shall only agree to Manchester Square," said he with firmness and
solemnity, "subject to the drains being all right. Somebody in the place
must show a little elementary sagacity and restraint."
"But the drains are bound to be all right!"
"I hope so," said the deceitful father. "And I believe they will be. But
until we're sure--nothing can be done." And he laughed satanically to
himself.
"Haven't you had the report yet?" Sissie complained. "Miss Warburton was
to try to get hold of it to-night."
A moment later Machin, in a condition of high excitement due to the
betrothal, brought in a large envelope, saying that Miss Warburton had
just left it. The envelope contained the report of Messrs. Doy and Doy
on the drains of the noble mansion. Mr. Prohack read it, frowned, and
pursed his judicial lips.
"Read it, my dear," he said to Eve.
Eve read that Messrs. Doy and Doy found themselves unable, after a
preliminary inspection, which owing to their instructions to be speedy
had not been absolutely exhaustive, to certify the drains of the noble
mansion. They feared the worst, but there was of course always a slight
hope of the best, or rather the second best. (They phrased it
differently but they meant that.) In the meantime they would await
further instructions. Mr. Prohack reflected calmly: "My new secretary is
an adept of the first conspiratorial order." Eve was shocked into
silence. (Doy and Doy used very thick and convincing note-paper.) The
entrance of Charlie loosed her tongue.
"Charlie!" she cried. "The drains are all wrong. Look at this. And
didn't you say the option expired to-morrow?"
Charlie read the report.
"Infernal rascals!" he muttered. "Whose doing is this? Who's been
worrying about drains?" He looked round accusingly.
"I have," said Mr. Prohack bravely, but he could not squarely meet the
boy's stern glance.
"Well, dad, what did you take me for? Did you suppose I should buy an
option on a house without being sure of the drains? My first act was to
have the drains surveyed by Flockers, the first firm in London, and I've
got their certificate. As for Doy and Doy, they're notorious. They want
to stop everybody else but themselves getting a commission on that
house, and this--" he slapped the report--"this is how they're setting
about it."
Eve adored her son.
"You see," she said victoriously to Mr. Prohack, who secretly trembled.
"I shall bring an action against Doy and Doy," Charlie continued. "I'll
show the whole rascally thing up."
"I hope you'll do no such thing, my boy," said Mr. Prohack, foolishly
attempting the grandiose.
"I most positively shall, dad."
Mr. Prohack realised desperately that all was lost except honour, and he
was by no means sure about even honour.
CHAPTER XVI
TRANSFER OF MIMI
I
Mr. Prohack passed a very bad night--the worst for months, one of the
outstanding bad nights of his whole existence.
"Why didn't I have it out with Charlie before he left?" he asked himself
some scores of times while listening to the tranquil regular breathing
of Eve, who of course was now sure of her house and probably had quite
forgotten the meaning of care. "I'm bound to have it out with him sooner
or later, and if I'd done it at once I should at any rate have slept.
They're all sleeping but me."
He simply could not comprehend life; the confounded thing called life
baffled him by its mysterious illogicalness. He was adored by his
spouse, beloved by his children, respected by the world. He had heaps of
money, together with the full control of it. His word, if he chose, was
law. He had only to say: "I will not take the house in Manchester
Square," and nobody could thwart him. He powerfully desired not to take
it. There was no sensible reason why he should take it. And yet he would
take it, under the inexplicable compulsion of circumstances. In those
sombre hours he had a fellow-feeling for Oriental tyrants, who were
absolute autocrats but also slaves of exactly the same sinister force
that had gripped himself. He perceived that in practice there is no such
thing as an autocrat....
Not that his defeat in regard to the house really disturbed him. He
could reconcile himself to the house, despite the hateful complications
which it would engender. What disturbed him horribly was the drains
business, the Doy and Doy business, the Mimi business; he could see no
way out of that except through the valley of humiliation. He remembered,
with terrible forebodings, the remark of his daughter after she heard of
the heritage: "You'll never be as happy again."
When the household day began and the familiar comfortable distant noises
of domestic activity announced that the solar system was behaving much
as usual in infinite and inconceivable space, he decided that he was
too tired to be scientifically idle that day--even though he had a
trying-on appointment with Mr. Melchizidek. He decided, too, that he
would not get up, would in fact take everything lying down, would refuse
to descend a single step of the stairs to meet trouble. And he had a
great wish to be irritated and angry. But, the place seemed to be full
of angels who turned the other cheek--and the other cheek was
marvellously soft and bewitching.
Eve, Sissie (who had called), and Machin--they were all in a state of
felicity, for the double reason that Sissie was engaged to be married,
and that the household was to move into a noble mansion. Machin saw
herself at the head of a troup of sub-parlourmaids and housemaids and
tweenies, and foretold that she would stand no nonsense from butlers.
They all treated Mr. Prohack as a formidable and worshipped tyrant,
whose smile was the sun and whose frown death, and who was the fount of
wisdom and authority. They knew that he wanted to be irritated, and they
gave him no chance to be irritated. Their insight into his psychology
was uncanny. They knew that he was beaten on the main point, and with
their detestable feminine realism they exquisitely yielded on all the
minor points. Eve, fresh as a rose, bent over him and bedewed him, and
said that she was going out and that Sissie had gone again.
When he was alone he rang the bell for Machin as though the bell had
done him an injury.
"What time is it?"
"Eleven o'clock, sir."
"Eleven o'clock! Good God! Why hasn't Miss Warburton come?"
As if Machin was responsible for Miss Warburton!... No! Mr. Prohack was
not behaving nicely, and it cannot be hidden that he lacked the grandeur
of mind which distinguishes most of us.
"Miss Warburton was here before ten o'clock, sir."
"Then why hasn't she come up?"
"She was waiting for orders, sir."
"Send her up immediately."
"Certainly, sir."
Miss Warburton was the fourth angel--an angel with another
spick-and-span blouse, and the light of devotion in her eyes and the
sound of it in her purling voice.
"Good morning," the gruff brute started. "Did I hear the telephone-bell
just now?"
"Yes, sir. Doy and Doy have telephoned to say that Mr. Charles Prohack
has just been in to see them, and they've referred him to you,
and--and--"
"And what? And what? And what?" (A machine-gun.)
"They said he was extremely unpleasant."
Instinctively Mr. Prohack threw away shame. Mimi was his minion. He
treated her as an Oriental tyrant might treat the mute guardian of the
seraglio, and told her everything,--that Charlie had forestalled them in
the matter of the drains of the noble mansion, that Charlie had
determined to destroy Doy and Doy, that he, Mr. Prohack, was caught in a
trap, that there was the devil to pay, and that the finest lies that
ingenuity could invent would have to be uttered. He abandoned all
pretence of honesty and uprightness. Mimi showed no surprise whatever,
nor was she apparently in the least shocked. She seemed to regard the
affair as a quite ordinary part of the day's routine. Her insensitive
calm frightened Mr. Prohack.
"Now we must think of something," said the iniquitous monster.
"I don't see that there need be any real difficulty," Mimi replied.
"_You_ didn't know anything about my plot with Doy and Doy. I got the
notion--quite wrongly--that you preferred not to have the house, and I
acted as I did through an excess of zeal. I must confess the plot. I
alone am to blame, and I admit that what I did was quite inexcusable."
"What a girl! What a girl!" thought Mr. Prohack. But there were limits
to his iniquity, and he said aloud, benevolently, grandiosely: "But I
did know about it. You as good as told me exactly what you meant to do,
and I let you do it. I approved, and I am responsible. Nothing will
induce me to let you take the responsibility. Let that be clearly
understood, please."
He looked squarely at the girl, and watched with apprehension her
aspiring nose rise still further, her delicate ruthless mouth become
still more ruthless.
"Excuse me," she said. "My plan is the best. It's the obvious plan. Mr.
Carrel Quire often adopted it. I'm afraid you're hesitating to trust me
as I expect to be trusted. Please don't forget that you sacrificed an
empire for me--I shall always remember that. And what's more, you said
you expected from me absolute loyalty to your interests. I can stand
anything but not being trusted--_fully_!"
Mr. Prohack sank deeper into the bed, and laughed loudly, immoderately,
titanically. His ill-humour vanished as a fog will vanish. Nevertheless
he was appalled by the revelation of the possibilities of the girl's
character.
The strange scene was interrupted by the arrival of Charlie, who, thanks
to his hypnotic influence over Machin, came masterfully straight
upstairs, entered the bedroom without asking permission to do so, and,
in perfect indifference to the alleged frailty of his father's health,
proceeded to business.
II
"Dad," said he, after Mimi had gone through her self-ordained martyrdom
and left the room. "I wonder whether you quite realise what a top-hole
creature that Warburton girl is. She's perfectly astounding."
"She is," Mr. Prohack admitted.
"She's got ideas."
"She has."
"And she isn't afraid of carrying them out."
"She is not."
"She's much too good for you, dad."
"She is."
"I mean, you can't really make full use of her, can you? She's got no
scope here."
"She makes her own scope," said Mr. Prohack.
"Now I honestly do need a good secretary," Charlie at last unmasked his
attack. "I've got a temporary idiot, and I want a first-rater,
preferably a woman. I wish you'd be decent and turn Miss Warburton over
to me. She'd be invaluable to me, and with me she really _would_ have
scope for her talents." Charlie laughed.
"What are you laughing at?"
"I was only thinking of her having the notion of queering the drains
like that because she wanted to please you. It was simply great. It's
the best thing I ever heard." He laughed again. "Now, dad, will you turn
her over to me?"
"You appear to think she's a slave to be bought and sold and this room
the slave-market," said Mr. Prohack. "It hasn't occurred to you that
_she_ might object to the transfer."
"Oh! I can soon persuade _her_." said Charlie, lightly.
"But you couldn't easily persuade me. And I may as well inform you at
once, my poor ingenuous boy, that I won't agree. I will never agree.
Miss Warburton is necessary to my existence."
"All in two or three days, is she?" Charlie observed sarcastically.
"Yes."
"Well, father, as we're talking straight, let's talk straight. I'm going
to take her from you. It's a very little help I'm asking you for, and
that you should refuse is a bit thick. I shall speak to the mater."
"And what shall you say?"
"I shall tell her all about the plot against the new house. It was
really a plot against her, because she wants the house--the house is
nothing to me. I may believe that you knew nothing about the plot
yourself, but I'll lay you any odds the mater won't."
"Speaking as man to man, my boy, I lay you any odds you can't put your
mother against me."
"Oh!" cried Charlie, "she won't _say_ she believes you're guilty, but
she'll believe it all the same. And it's what people think that matters,
not what they say they think."
"That's wisdom," Mr. Prohack agreed. "I see that I brought you up not so
badly after all. But doesn't it strike you that you're trying to
blackmail your father? I hope I taught you sagacity, but I never
encouraged you in blackmail--unless my memory fails me."
"You can call it by any name you please," said Charlie.
"Very well, then, I will. I'll call it blackmail. Give me a cigarette."
He lit the offered cigarette. "Anything else this morning?"
Father and son smiled warily at one another. Both were amused and even
affectionate, but serious in the battle.
"Come along, dad. Be a sport. Anyhow, let's ask the girl."
"Do you know what my answer to blackmail is?" Mr. Prohack blandly
enquired.
"No."
"My answer is the door. Drop the subject entirely. Or sling your
adventurous book."
Mr. Prohack was somewhat startled to see Charlie walk straight out of
the bedroom. A disturbing suspicion that there might be something
incalculable in his son was rudely confirmed.
He said to himself: "But this is absurd."
III
That morning the Prohack bedroom seemed to be transformed into a sort of
public square. No sooner had Charlie so startlingly left than Machin
entered again.
"Dr. Veiga, sir."
And Dr. Veiga came in. The friendship between Mr. Prohack and his
picturesque quack had progressed--so much so that Eve herself had begun
to twit her husband with having lost his head about the doctor.
Nevertheless Eve was privately very pleased with the situation, because
it proved that she had been right and Mr. Prohack wrong concerning the
qualities of the fat, untidy, ironic Portuguese. Mr. Prohack was
delighted to see him, for an interview with Dr. Veiga always meant an
unusual indulgence in the sweets of candour and realism.
"This is my wife's doing, no doubt," said Mr. Prohack, limply shaking
hands.
"She called to see me, ostensibly about herself, but of course in fact
about you. However, I thought she needed a tonic, and I'll write out the
prescription while I'm here. Now what's the matter with you?"
"No!" Mr. Prohack burst out, "I'm hanged if I'll tell you. I'm not going
to do your work for you. Find out."
Dr. Veiga examined, physically and orally, and then said: "There's
nothing at all the matter with you, my friend."
"That's just where you're mistaken," Mr. Prohack retorted. "There's
something rather serious the matter with me. I'm suffering from grave
complications. Only you can't help me. My trouble is spiritual. Neither
pills nor tonics can touch it. But that doesn't make it any better."
"Try me," said Dr. Veiga. "I'm admirable on the common physical
ailments, and by this time I should have been universally recognised as
a great man if common ailments were uncommon; because you know in my
profession you never get any honour unless you make a study of diseases
so rare that nobody has them. Discover a new disease, and save the life
of some solitary nigger who brought it to Liverpool, and you'll be a
baronet in a fortnight and a member of all the European academies in a
month. But study colds, indigestion and insomnia, and change a thousand
lives a year from despair to felicity, and no authority will take the
slightest notice of you ... As with physical, so with mental
diseases--or spiritual, if you like to call them so. You don't suspect
that in the common mental diseases I'm a regular benefactor of mankind;
but I am. I don't blame you for not knowing it, because you're about the
last person I should have thought susceptible to any mental disease, and
so you've had no chance of finding out. Now, what is it?"
"Don't I tell you I'm suffering from horrible complications?" cried Mr.
Prohack.
"What kind of complications?"
"Every kind. My aim has always been to keep my life simple, and I
succeeded very well--perhaps too well--until I inherited money. I don't
mind money, but I do mind complications. I don't want a large
house--because it means complications. I desire Sissie's happiness, but
I hate weddings. I desire to be looked after, but I hate strange
servants. I can find pleasure in a motor-car, but I hate even the risk
of accidents. I have no objection to an income, but I hate investments.
And so on. All I ask is to live simply and sensibly, but instead of that
my existence is transformed into a quadratic equation. And I can't stop
it. My happiness is not increasing--it's decreasing. I spend more and
more time in wondering whither I am going, what I am after, and where
precisely is the point of being alive at all. That's a fact, and now you
know it."
Dr. Veiga rose from his chair and deliberately sat down on the side of
his patient's bed. The gesture in itself was sufficiently
unprofessional, but he capped it with another of which probably no
doctor had ever been guilty in a British sick-room before; he pulled out
a pocket-knife and became his own manicure, surveying his somewhat
neglected hands with a benevolently critical gaze, smiling at them as if
to say: "What funny hands you are!"
And Mr. Prohack felt that the doctor was saying: "What a funny Prohack
you are!"
"My friend," said Dr. Veiga at length (with his voice), "my friend, I
will not conceal from you that your alarm was justified. You are
suffering from one of the commonest and one of the gravest mental
derangements. I'm surprised, but there it is. You haven't yet discovered
that it's the earth you're living on. You fancy it may be Sirius,
Uranus, Aldebaran or Jupiter--let us say Jupiter. Perhaps in one of
these worlds matters are ordered differently, and their truth is not our
truth; but let me assure you that the name of your planet is the Earth
and that on the earth one great unalterable truth prevails. Namely:--You
can't do this"--here Dr. Veiga held up a pared and finished finger and
wagged it to and fro with solemnity--"you can't do this without moving
your finger ... You were aware of this great truth? Then why are you
upset because you can't wag your finger without moving it?... Perhaps
I'm being too subtle for you. Let me put the affair in another way.
You've lost sight of the supreme earthly fact that everything has not
merely a consequence, but innumerable consequences. You knew when you
married that you were creating endless consequences, and now you want to
limit the consequences. You knew when you accepted a fortune that you
were creating endless consequences, and now you want to limit them too.
You want to alter the rules after the game has started. You set in
motion circumstances which were bound to influence the development of
the members of your family, and when the inevitable new developments
begin, you object, simply because you hadn't foreseen them. You knew
that money doesn't effectively exist until it's spent and that you can't
spend money without causing consequences, and when your family causes
consequences by bringing the money to life you complain that you're a
martyr to the consequences and that you hadn't bargained for
complications. My poor friend, you have made one crucial mistake in your
career,--the mistake of being born. Happily the mistake is curable. I
can give you several prescriptions. The first is prussic acid. If you
don't care for that you can donate the whole of your fortune to the
Sinking Fund for extinguishing the National Debt and you can return to
the Treasury. If you don't care for that you can leave your family
mysteriously and go and live in Timbuctoo by yourself. If you don't care
for that you can buy a whip and forbid your wife and daughter to grow
older or change in any way on pain of a hundred lashes. And if you don't
like that you can acquaint yourself with the axioms that neither you nor
anybody else are the centre of the universe and that what you call
complications are simply another name for life itself. Worry is life,
and life is worry. And the absence of worry is death. I won't say to you
that you're rich and beloved and therefore you've nothing to worry
about. I'll say to you, you've got a lot to worry about because you're
rich and beloved.... I'll leave the other hand for to-morrow." Dr. Veiga
snapped down the blade of the pocket-knife.
"Platitudes!" ejaculated Mr. Prohack.
"Certainly," agreed the quack. "But I've told you before that it's by
telling everybody what everybody knows that I earn my living."
"I'll get up," said Mr. Prohack.
"And not too soon," said the quack. "Get up by all means and deal with
your worries. All worries can be dealt with."
"It doesn't make life any better," said Mr. Prohack.
"Nothing makes life any better, except death--and there's a disgusting
rumour that there is no death. Where shall I find a pencil, my dear
fellow? I've forgotten mine, and I want to prescribe Mrs. Prohack's
tonic."
"In the boudoir there," said Mr. Prohack. "What the deuce are you
smiling at?"
"I'm smiling because I'm so glad to find you aren't so wise as you
look." And Dr. Veiga disappeared blithely into the boudoir.
Almost at the same moment Mimi knocked and entered. She entered, stared
harshly at Mr. Prohack, and then the corners of her ruthless mouth
twitched and loosened and she began to cry.
"Doctor," called Mr. Prohack, "come here at once." The doctor came. "You
say all worries can be dealt with? How should you deal with this one?"
The doctor dropped a slip of paper on to the bed and walked silently out
of the room, precisely as Charlie had done.
IV
In regard to the effect of the sermon of Dr. Veiga on Mr. Prohack, it
was as if Mr. Prohack had been a desk with many drawers and one drawer
open, and the sermon had been dropped into the drawer and the drawer
slammed to and nonchalantly locked. The drawer being locked, Mr. Prohack
turned to the weeping figure in front of him, which suddenly ceased to
weep and became quite collected and normal.
"Now, my child," said Mr. Prohack, "I have just been informed that
everything has a consequence. I've seen the consequence. What is the
thing?"
He was rather annoyed by Mimi's tears, but in his dangerous
characteristic desire to please, he could not keep kindness out of his
tone, and Mimi, reassured and comforted, began feebly to smile, and also
Mr. Prohack remarked that her mouth was acquiring firmness again.
"I ought to tell you in explanation of anything of a personal nature
that I may have said to him in your presence, that the gentleman just
gone is my medical adviser, and I have no secrets from him; in that
respect he stands equal with you and above everybody else in the world
without exception. So you must excuse my freedom in directing his
attention to you."
"It's I who ought to apologise," said Miss Warburton, positively. "But
the fact is I hadn't the slightest idea that you weren't alone. I was
just a little bit upset because I understand that you want to get rid of
me."
"Ah!" murmured Mr. Prohaek, "who put that notion into your absurd
head?"
He knew he was exercising his charm, but he could not help it.
"Mr. Charles. He's just been down to my room and told me."
"I hope you remembered what I said to you about your duty so far as he
is concerned."
"Of course, Mr. Prohack." She smiled anew; and her smile, so clever, so
self-reliant, so enigmatic, a little disturbed Mr. Prohack.
"What did my son say to you?"
"He said that he was urgently in need of a thoroughly competent
secretary at once--confidential--and that he was sure I was the very
woman to suit him, and that he would give me double the salary I was
getting."
"Did you tell him how much you're getting?"
"No."
"Well, neither did I! And then?"
"Then he told me all about his business, how big it was, and growing
quickly, too, and how he was after a young woman who had tact and
resource and could talk to any one from a bank director to a mechanic or
a clergyman, and that tens of thousands of pounds might often depend on
my tact, and that you wouldn't mind my being transferred from you to
him."
"And I suppose he asked you to go off with him immediately?"
"No, at the beginning of next week."
"And what did you say?" demanded Mr. Prohack, amazed and frightened at
the manoeuvres of his unscrupulous son.
"Naturally I said that I couldn't possibly leave you--unless you told me
to go, and that I owed everything to you. Then he asked me what I did
for you, and I said I was particularly busy at present making a schedule
of all your new purchases and checking the outfitters' accounts, and so
on. That reminds me, I haven't been able to get the neckties right yet."
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack. "Not been able to get the
neckties right! But this is very serious. The neckties are most
important. Most important!"
"Oh!" said Mimi. "If necessary I shall run round to Bond Street in my
lunch-hour."
At this point the drawer in the desk started to unlock itself and open
of its own accord, and Mr. Prohack's eye caught a glimpse of a page of
the sermon.
Mimi continued:
"We mustn't forget there'll be hundreds of things to see to about the
new house."
"Will there?"
"Well, Mrs. Prohack told Machin, and Machin has just told me, that it's
all settled about taking the house. And I know what taking a house is.
Mr. Carrel Quire was always taking new houses."
"But perhaps you could keep an eye on the house even if you went over to
Mr. Charles?"
"Then it's true," said Mimi. "You do want me to go." But she showed no
sign of weeping afresh.
"You must understand," Mr. Prohack said with much benevolence, "that my
son is my son. Of course my clothes are also my clothes. But Charles is
in a difficult position. He's at the beginning of his career, whereas
I'm at the end of mine. He needs all the help he can get, and he can
afford to pay more than I can. And even at the cost of having to check
my own neckties I shouldn't like to stand in his way. That's how I look
at it. Mind you, I have certainly not told Charlie that I'll set you
free."
"I quite see," said Mimi. "And naturally if you put it like that--"
"You'll still be in the family."
"I shall be very sorry to leave you, Mr. Prohack."
"Doubtless. But you'll be even gladder to go over to Charles, though
with him you'll be more like a kettle tied to the tail of a mad dog than
a confidential secretary."
Mimi raised the tip of her nose.
"Excuse me, Mr. Prohack, I shall _not_ be gladder to go over to Mr.
Charles. Any girl will tell you that she prefers to work for a man of
your age than for a boy. Boys are not interesting."
"Yes," murmured Mr. Prohack. "A comfortable enough theory. And I've
already heard it more than once from girls. But I've never seen any
confirmation of it in practice. And I don't believe it. I'll tell you
something about yourself you don't know. You're delighted to go over to
my son. And if I'd refused to let you go I should have had a martyr
instead of a secretary. You want adventure. You want a field for your
remarkable talent for conspiracy and chicane. You know by experience
there's little scope for it here. But under my son your days will be
breathless.... No, no! I don't wish to hear anything. Run away and get
on with your work. And you can telephone my decision to Charles. I'm now
going to get up and wear all my new neckties at once."
Miss Warburton departed in a state of emotion.
As, with all leisureliness, Mr. Prohack made himself beautiful to
behold, he reflected: "I'm very impulsive. I've simply thrown that girl
into the arms of that boy. Eve will have something to say about it.
Still, there's one complication off my chest."
Eve returned home as he was descending the stairs, and she blew him
upstairs again and shut the door of the bedroom and pushed him into the
privacy of the boudoir.
"It's all settled," said she. "I've signed the tenancy agreement for a
year. Charlie said I could, and it would save you trouble. It doesn't
matter the cheque for the first half-year's rent being signed by you,
only of course the house will be in my name. How handsome you are,
darling!" And she kissed him and re-tied one of the new cravats. "But
that's not what I wanted to tell you, darling." Her face grew grave. "Do
you know I'm rather troubled about Charlie--and your friend Lady
Massulam. They're off again this morning."
"My friend?"
"Well, you know she adores you. It would be perfectly awful
if--if--well, you understand what I mean. I hear she really is a widow,
so that--well, you understand what I mean! I'm convinced she's at least
thirty years older than Charlie. But you see she's French, and French
women are so clever.... You can never be sure with them."
"Fluttering heart," said Mr. Prohack, suddenly inspired. "Don't get
excited. I've thought of all that already, and I've taken measures to
guard against it. I'm going to give Charlie my secretary. She'll see
that Lady Massulam doesn't make any more headway, trust her!"
"Arthur, how clever you are! Nobody but you would have thought of that.
But isn't it a bit dangerous, too? You see--don't you?"
Mr. Prohack shook his head.
"I gather you've been reading the love-story in _The Daily Picture_,"
said he. "In _The Daily Picture_ the typist always marries the
millionaire. But outside _The Daily Picture_ I doubt whether these
romantic things really happen. There are sixty-five thousand girls
typists in the City alone, besides about a million in Whitehall. The
opportunities for espousing millionaires and ministers of state are
countless. But no girl-typist has been married at St. George's, Hanover
Square, since typewriters were invented."
CHAPTER XVII
ROMANCE
I
The very next day Mr. Prohack had a plutocratic mood of overbearingness,
which led to a sudden change in his location--the same being transferred
to Frinton-on-Sea. The mood was brought about by a visit to the City, at
the summons of Paul Spinner; and the visit included conversations not
only with Paul, but with Smathe and Smathe, the solicitors, and with a
firm of stockbrokers. Paul handed over to his crony saleable securities,
chiefly in the shape of scrip of the greatest oil-combine and its
subsidiaries, for a vast amount, and advised Mr. Prohack to hold on to
them, as, owing to the present depression due to the imminence of a
great strike, they were likely to be "marked higher" before Mr. Prohack
was much older. Mr. Prohack declined the advice, and he also declined
the advice of solicitors and stockbrokers, who were both full of wisdom
and of devices for increasing capital values. What these firms knew
about the future, and about the consequences of causes and about "the
psychology of the markets" astounded the simple Terror of the
departments; and it was probably unanswerable. But, being full of
riches, Mr. Prohack did not trouble to answer it; he merely swept it
away with a tyrannical and impatient gesture, which gesture somehow
mysteriously established him at once as a great authority on the art of
investment.
"Now listen to me," said he imperiously, and the manipulators of shares
listened, recalling to themselves that Mr. Prohack had been a Treasury
official for over twenty years and must therefore be worth
hearing--although the manipulators commonly spent many hours a week in
asserting, in the press and elsewhere, that Treasury officials
comprehended naught of finance. "Now listen to me. I don't care a hang
about my capital. It may decrease or increase, and I shan't care. All I
care for is my interest. I want to be absolutely sure that my interest
will tumble automatically into my bank on fixed dates. No other
consideration touches me. I'm not a gambler. I'm not a usurer.
Industrial development leaves me cold, and if I should ever feel any
desire to knit the Empire closer together I'll try to do it without
making a profit out of it. At the moment all I'm after is certain, sure,
fixed interest. Hence--Government securities, British Government or
Colonial! Britain is of course rotten to the core, always was, always
will be. Still, I'll take my chances. I'm infernally insular where
investment is concerned. There's one thing to be said about the British
Empire--you do know where you are in it. And I don't mind some municipal
stocks. I even want some. I can conceive the smash-up of the British
Empire, but I cannot conceive Manchester defaulting in its interest
payments. Can you?" And he looked round and paused for a reply, and no
reply came. Nobody dared to boast himself capable of conceiving
Manchester's default.
Towards the end of the arduous day Mr. Prohack departed from the City,
leaving behind him an immense reputation for financial sagacity, and a
scheme of investment under which he could utterly count upon a modest
regular income of L17,000 per annum. He was sacrificing over L5,000 per
annum in order to be free from an investor's anxieties, and he reckoned
that his peace of mind was cheap at a hundred pounds a week. This detail
alone shows to what an extent the man's taste for costly luxuries had
grown.
Naturally he arrived home swollen. Now it happened that Eve also, by
reason of her triumph in regard to the house in Manchester Square, had
swelled head. A conflict of individualities occurred. A trifle, even a
quite pleasant trifle! Nothing that the servants might not hear with
advantage. But before you could say 'knife' Mr. Prohack had said that he
would go away for a holiday and abandon Eve to manage the removal to
Manchester Square how she chose, and Ere had leapt on to the challenge
and it was settled that Mr. Prohack should go to Frinton-on-Sea.
Eve selected Frinton-on-Sea for him because Dr. Veiga had recommended it
for herself. She had a broad notion of marriage as a commonwealth. She
loved to take Mr. Prohack's medicines, and she was now insisting on his
taking her watering-places. Mr. Prohack said that the threatened great
strike might prevent his journey. Pooh! She laughed at such fears. She
drove him herself to Liverpool Street.
"You may see your friend Lady Massulam," said she, as the car entered
the precincts of the station. (Once again he was struck by the words
'your friend' prefixed to Lady Massulam; but he offered no comment on
them.)
"Why Lady Massulam?" he asked.
"Didn't you know she's got a house at Frinton?" replied Mrs. Prohack.
"Everybody has in these days. It's the thing."
She didn't see him into the train, because she was in a hurry about
butlers. Mr. Prohack was cast loose in the booking-hall and had a fine
novel sensation of freedom.
II
Never since marriage had he taken a holiday alone--never desired to do
so. He felt himself to be on the edge of romance. Frinton, for example,
presented itself as a city of romance. He knew it not, knew scarcely any
English seaside, having always managed to spend his holidays abroad; but
Frinton must, he was convinced, be strangely romantic. The train thither
had an aspect which strengthened this conviction. It consisted largely
of first-class coaches, and in the window of nearly every first-class
compartment and saloon was exhibited a notice: "This compartment (or
saloon) is reserved for members of the North Essex Season-Ticket-Holders
Association." Mr. Prohack, being still somewhat swollen, decided that he
was a member of the North Essex Season-Ticket-Holders Association and
acted accordingly. Otherwise he might never have reached Frinton.
He found himself in a sort of club, about sixty feet by six, where
everybody knew everybody except Mr. Prohack, and where cards and other
games, tea and other drinks, tobacco and other weeds, were being played
and consumed in an atmosphere of the utmost conviviality. Mr. Prohack
was ignored, but he was not objected to. His fellow-travellers regarded
him cautiously, as a new chum. The head attendant and dispenser was very
affable, as to a promising neophyte. Only the ticket-inspector singled
him out from all the rest by stopping in front of him.
"My last hour has come," thought Mr. Prohack as he produced his
miserable white return-ticket.
All stared; the inspector stared; but nothing happened. Mr. Prohack had
a sense of reprieve, and also of having been baptised or inducted into a
secret society. He listened heartily to forty conversations about
physical diversions and luxuries and about the malignant and fatuous
wrong-headedness of men who went on strike, and about the approaching
catastrophic end of all things.
Meanwhile, at any rate in the coach, the fabric of society seemed to be
holding together fairly well. Before the train was half-way to Frinton
Mr. Prohack judged--and rightly--that he was already there. The fact was
that he had been there ever since entering the saloon. After two hours
the train, greatly diminished in length, came to rest in the midst of a
dark flatness, and the entire population of the coach vanished out of it
in the twinkling of an eye, and Mr. Prohack saw the name 'Frinton' on a
flickering oil-lamp, and realised that he was at the gates of the most
fashionable resort in England, a spot where even the ozone was
exclusive. The station staff marvelled at him because he didn't know
where the Majestic Hotel was and because he asked without notice for a
taxi, fly, omnibus or anything on wheels. All the other passengers had
disappeared. The exclusive ozone was heavy with exciting romance for Mr.
Prohack as the station staff considered his unique and incomprehensible
case. Then a tiny omnibus materialised out of the night.
"Is this the Majestic bus?" Mr. Prohack enquired of the driver.
"Well, it is if you like, sir," the driver answered.
Mr. Prohack did like....
The Majestic was large and prim, resembling a Swiss hotel in its
furniture, the language and composition of the menu, the dialect of the
waiters; but it was about fifteen degrees colder than the highest hotel
in Switzerland. The dining-room was shaded with rose-shaded lamps and it
susurrated with the polite whisperings of elegant couples and trios, and
the entremet was cabinet pudding: a fine display considering the depth
of winter and of the off-season.
Mr. Prohack went off after dinner for a sharp walk in the east wind.
Solitude! Blackness! Night! East wind in the bushes of gardens that
shielded the facades of large houses! Not a soul! Not a policeman! He
descended precariously to the vast, smooth beach. The sound of the sea!
Romance! Mr. Prohack seemed to walk for miles, like Ozymandias, on the
lone and level sands. Then he fancied he descried a moving object. He
was not mistaken. It approached him. It became a man and a woman. It
became a man and a young woman arm-in-arm and soul-in-soul. And there
was nothing but the locked couple, and the sound of the invisible,
immeasurable sea, and the east wind, and Mr. Prohack. Romance thrilled
through Mr. Prohack's spine.
"So I said to him," the man was saying to the young woman as the pair
passed Mr. Prohack, "I said to him 'I could do with a pint o' that,' I
said."
III
The next morning Mr. Prohack rose with alacrity from a hard bed, and was
greeted in the hall by the manager of the hotel, an enormous,
middle-aged, sun-burnt, jolly person in flannels and an incandescent
blazer, who asked him about his interests in golf and hard-court tennis.
Mr. Prohack, steeped as he felt himself to be in strange romance, was
prepared to be interested in these games, but the self-protective
instinct warned him that since these games could not be played alone
they would, if he indulged in them, bring him into contact with people
who might prove tedious. He therefore changed the conversation and asked
whether he could have strawberry jam to his breakfast. The manager's
face instantly changed, hardening to severity. Was Mr. Prohack
eccentric? Did he desire to disturb the serene habits of the hotel? The
manager promised to see. He did see, and announced that he was 'afraid'
that Mr. Prohack could not have strawberry jam to his breakfast. And Mr.
Prohack said to himself: "What would my son Charles have done?" During a
solitary breakfast (with blackberry jam) in the huge dining-room, Mr.
Prohack decided that Charles would have approached the manager
differently.
After breakfast he saw the manager again, and he did not enquire from
the manager whether there was any chance of hiring a motor-car. He said
briefly:
"I want to hire a car, please. It must be round here in half an hour,
sharp."
"I will attend to the matter myself," said the manager humbly.
The car kept the rendezvous, and Mr. Prohack inspected Frinton from the
car. He admired the magnificent reserve of Frinton, which was the most
English place he had ever seen. The houses gave nothing away; the
shivering shopping ladies in the streets gave nothing away; and
certainly the shops gave nothing away. The newspaper placards announced
what seemed to be equivalent to the end of the existing social order;
but Frinton apparently did not blench nor tremble; it went calmly and
powerfully forward into the day (which was Saturday), relying upon the
great British axiom: "To ignore is to destroy." It ignored the end of
the existing social order, and lo! there was no end. Up and down various
long and infinitely correct avenues of sheltered homes drove Mr.
Prohack, and was everywhere baffled in his human desire to meet Frinton
half-way. He stopped the car at the Post Office and telegraphed to his
wife: "No strawberry jam in this city. Love. Arthur." The girl behind
the counter said: "One and a penny, please," and looked hard at him.
Five minutes later he returned to the Post Office and telegraphed to his
wife: "Omitted to say in previous telegram that Frinton is the greatest
expression of Anglo-Saxon character I have ever encountered. Love.
Arthur." The girl behind the counter said: "Two and three, please,"
stared harder at him, and blushed. Perceiving the blush, Mr. Prohack at
once despatched a third telegram to his wife: "But it has charming
weaknesses. Love. Arthur." Extraordinarily happy and gay, he drove out
of Frinton to see the remainder of North East Essex in the enheartening
east wind.
In the evening he fell asleep in the lounge while waiting for dinner,
having dressed a great deal too soon and being a great deal too full of
east wind. When he woke up he noticed a different atmosphere in the
hotel. Youth and brightness had entered it. The lounge had vivacity and
expectation; and Mr. Prohack learned that Saturday night was gala, with
a dance and special bridge. Not even the news that the star-guest of the
hotel, Lord Partick, was suddenly indisposed and confined to his room
could dash the new optimism of the place.
At dinner the manager walked around the little tables and gorgeously
babbled with diners about the sportive feats of the day. And Mr.
Prohack, seeing that his own turn was coming, began to feel as if he was
on board a ship. He feared the worst and the worst came.
"Perhaps you'd like to make a fourth at bridge. If so--" said the
manager jollily. "Or perhaps you dance. If so--"
Mr. Prohack shut his eyes and gave forth vague affirmatives.
And as soon as the manager had left him he gazed around the room at the
too-blonde women young and old and wondered fearfully which would be his
portion for bridge or dance. In the lounge after dinner he ignited a
cigar and watched the lighting up of the ball-room (ordinarily the
drawing-room) and the entry of the musicians therein. Then he observed
the manager chatting with two haughty beldames and an aged gentleman,
and they all three cast assaying glances upon Mr. Prohack, and Mr.
Prohack knew that he had been destined for bridge, not dancing, and the
manager moved towards him, and Mr. Prohack breathed his last sigh but
one....
But the revolving doors at the entrance revolved, and out of the
Frintonian night appeared Lady Massulam, magnificently enveloped. Seldom
had Mr. Prohack's breast received a deeper draught of mingled
astonishment and solace. Hitherto he had not greatly cared for Lady
Massulam, and could not see what Charlie saw in her. Now he saw what
Charlie saw and perhaps more also. She had more than dignity,--she had
style. And she femininely challenged. She was like a breeze oil the
French shore to a British barque cruising dully in the Channel. She
welcomed the sight of Mr. Prohack, and her greeting of him made a
considerable change in the managerial attitude towards the unassuming
Terror of the departments. The manager respectfully informed Lady
Massulam that Lord Partick was indisposed, and respectfully took himself
off. Lady Massulam and Mr. Prohack then proceeded to treat each other
like new toys. Mr. Prohack had to explain why he was at Frinton, and
Lady Massulam explained that whenever she was in Frinton at the week-end
she always came to the Majestic to play bridge with old Lord Partick. It
flattered him; she liked him, though he had bought his peerage; he was a
fine player--so was she; and lastly they had had business relations, and
financially Lord Partick watched over her as over a young girl.
Mr. Prohack was relieved thus to learn that Lady Massulam had not
strolled into the Majestic Hotel, Frinton, to play bridge with nobody in
particular. Still, she was evidently well known to the habitues, several
of whom approached to greet her. She temporised with them in her calm
Latin manner, neither encouraging nor discouraging their advances, and
turning back to Mr. Prohack by her side at every surcease.
"We shall be compelled to play bridge if we do not take care," she
murmured in his ear, as a dowager larger than herself loomed up.
"Yes," murmured Mr. Prohack, "I've been feeling the danger ever since
dinner. Will you dance with me,--not of course as a pleasure--I won't
flatter myself--but as a means of salvation?"
The dowager bore down with a most definite suggestion for bridge in the
card-room. Lady Massulam definitely stated that she was engaged to
dance....
Well, of course Lady Massulam was something of a galleon herself; but
she was a beautiful dancer; that is to say, she responded perfectly to
the male volition; she needed no pushing and no pulling; she moved under
his will as lightly as a young girl. Her elaborately dressed hair had an
agreeable scent; her complexion was a highly successful achievement;
everything about her had a quiet and yet a dazzling elegance which had
been obtained regard-less of expense. As for her figure, it was on a
considerable scale, but its important contours had a soft and delicate
charm. And all that was nothing in the estimation of Mr. Prohack
compared with her glance. At intervals in the fox-trot he caught the
glance. It was arch, flirtatious, eternally youthful, challenging; and
it expressed pleasure in the fox-trot. Mr. Prohack was dancing better
than ever before in his career as a dancer. She made him dance better.
She was not the same woman whom he had first met at lunch at the Grand
Babylon Hotel. She was a new revelation, packed with possibilities. Mr.
Prohack recalled his wife's phrase: "You know she adores you." He hadn't
known. Honestly such an idea had not occurred to him. But did she adore
him? Not "adore"--naturally--but had she a bit of a fancy for him?
Mr. Prohack became the youngest man in the room,--an extraordinary case
of rejuvenescence. He surveyed the room with triumph. He sniffed up the
brassy and clicking music into his vibrating nostrils. He felt no envy
of any man in the room. When the band paused he clapped like a child for
another dose of fox-trot. At the end of the third dose they were both a
little breathless and they had ices. After a waltz they both realised
that excess would be imprudent, and returned to the lounge.
"I wish you'd tell me something about my son," said Mr. Prohack. "I
think you must be the greatest living authority on him."
"Here?" exclaimed Lady Massulam.
"Anywhere. Any time."
"It would be safer at my house," said Lady Massulam. "But before I go I
must just write a little note to Lord Partick. He will expect it."
That was how she invited him to The Lone Cedar, the same being her
famous bungalow on the Front.
IV
"Your son," said Lady Massulam, in a familiar tone, but most
reassuringly like an aunt of Charlie's, after she had explained how they
had met in Glasgow through being distantly connected by the same
business deal, and how she had been impressed by Charlie's youthful
capacity, "your son has very great talent for big affairs, but he is now
playing a dangerous game--far more dangerous than he imagines, and he
will not be warned. He is selling something he hasn't got before he
knows what price he will have to pay for it."
"Ah!" breathed Mr. Prohack.
They were sitting together in the richly ornamented bungalow
drawing-room, by the fire. Lady Massulam sat up straight Sn her sober
and yet daring evening frock. Mr. Prohack lounged with formless grace in
a vast easy-chair neighbouring a whiskey-and-soda. She had not asked him
to smoke; he did not smoke, and he had no wish to smoke. She was a
gorgeously mature specimen of a woman. He imagined her young, and he
decided that he preferred the autumn to the spring. She went on talking
of finance.
"She is moving in regions that Eve can never know," he thought. "But how
did Eve perceive that she had taken a fancy to me?"
The alleged danger to Charlie scarcely disturbed him. Her appreciation
or depreciation of Charlie interested him only in so far as it was a
vehicle for the expression of her personality. He had never met such a
woman. He responded to her with a vivacity that surprised himself. He
looked surreptitiously round the room, brilliantly lighted here, and
there obscure, and he comprehended how every detail of its varied
sumptuosity aptly illustrated her mind and heart. His own heart was full
of quite new sensations.
"Of course," she was saying, "if Charles is to become the really great
figure that he might be, he will have to cure his greatest fault, and
perhaps it is incurable."
"I know what that is," said Mr. Prohack, softly but positively.
"What is it?" Her glance met his.
"His confounded reserve, lack of elasticity, lack of adaptability. The
old British illusion that everything will come to him who won't budge.
Why, it's a ten-horse-power effort for him even to smile!"
Lady Massulam seemed to leap from her chair, and she broke swiftly into
French:
"Oh! You comprehend then, you? If you knew what I have suffered in your
terrible England! But you do not suspect what I have suffered! I advance
myself. They retire before me. I advance myself again. They retire
again. I open. They close. Do they begin? Never! It is always I who must
begin! Do I make a natural gesture--they say to themselves, 'What a
strange woman! How indiscreet! But she is foreign.' They lift their
shoulders. Am I frank--they pity me. They give themselves never! They
are shut like their lips over their long teeth. Ah, but they have taught
me. In twenty years have I not learnt the lesson? There is nobody among
you who can be more shut-tight than me. I flatter myself that I can be
more terrible than any English woman or man. You do not catch me now!
But what a martyrdom!... I might return to France? No! I am become too
English. In Paris I should resemble an _emigree_. And people would say:
'What is that? It is like nothing at all. It has no name.' Besides, I
like you English. You are terrible, but one can count on you.... _Vous y
etes?_"
"_J'y suis_," replied Mr. Prohack, ravished.
Lady Massulam in her agitation picked up the tumbler and sipped.
"Pardon!" she cried, aghast. "It is yours," and planked the tumbler down
again on the lacquered table.
Mr. Prohack had the wit to drink also. They went on talking.... A silver
tongue vibrated from the hall with solemn British deliberation--One!
Two! The air throbbed to the sound for many seconds.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack |
