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

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