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

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