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

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