Mr. Prohack by Arnold Bennett (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

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