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

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