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

perceived that there was a good chance of getting his hundred pounds back, possibly with interest--and the interest would mount up to fifty or sixty pounds. And a hundred and fifty pounds appeared to him to be an enormous sum. Then it occurred to him that probably Mr. Bishop was not indeed "after" anything and that he had been unjust to Mr. Bishop.

"Married?" he questioned, casually.

"Angmering? No. He never married. You know as well as anybody, I expect, what sort of a card he was. No relations, either."

"Then who's come into his money?"

"Well," said Mr. Bishop, with elaborate ease and smoothness of quiet delivery. "I've come into some of it. And there was a woman--actress sort of young thing--about whom perhaps the less said the better--she's come into some of it. And you've come into some of it. We share it in equal thirds."

"The deuce we do!"

"Yes."

"How long's he been dead?"

"About five weeks or less. I sailed as soon as I could after he was buried. I'd arranged before to come. I daresay I ought to have stayed a bit longer, as I'm the executor under the will, but I wanted to come, and I've got a very good lawyer over there--and over here too. I landed this morning, and here I am. Strictly speaking I suppose I should have cabled you. But it seemed to me that I could explain better by word of mouth."

"I wish you would explain," said Mr. Prohack. "You say he's been rich a long time, but he didn't pay his debt to me, and yet he goes and makes a will leaving me a third of his fortune. Wants some explaining, doesn't it?"

Mr. Bishop replied:

"It does and it doesn't. You knew he was a champion postponer, poor old chap. Profoundly unbusinesslike. It's astonishing how unbusinesslike successful men are! He was always meaning to come to England to see you; but he never found time. He constantly talked of you--"

"But do you know," Mr. Prohack intervened, "that from that day to this I've never heard one single word from him? Not even a picture-postcard. And what's more I've never heard a single word _of_ him."

"Just like Silas, that was! Just!... He died from a motor accident. He was perfectly conscious and knew he'd only a few hours to live. Spine. He made his will in hospital, and died about a couple of hours after he'd made it. I wasn't there myself. I was in New York."

"Well, well!" muttered Mr. Prohack. "Poor fellow! Well, well! This is the most amazing tale I ever heard in my life."

"It _is_ rather strange," Mr. Bishop compassionately admitted.

A silence fell--respectful to the memory of the dead. The members' coffee-room seemed to Mr. Prohack to be a thousand miles off, and the chat with his cronies at the table in the window-embrasure to have happened a thousand years ago. His brain was in anarchy, and waving like a flag above the anarchy was the question: "How much did old Silas leave?" But the deceitful fellow would not permit the question to utter itself,--he had dominion over himself at any rate to that extent. He would not break the silence; he would hide his intense curiosity; he would force Softly Bishop to divulge the supreme fact upon his own initiative.

And at length Mr. Bishop remarked, musingly:

"Yes. Thanks to the exchange being so low, you stand to receive at the very least a hundred thousand pounds clear--after all deductions have been made."

"Do I really?" said Mr. Prohack, also musingly.


CHAPTER III


THE LAW

His tranquil tone disguised the immense anarchy within. Silas Angmering had evidently been what is called a profiteer. He had made his money "out of the war." And Silas was an Englishman. While Englishmen, and--later--Americans, had given up lives, sanity, fortunes, limbs, eyesight, health, Silas had gained riches. There was nothing highly unusual in this. Mr. Prohack had himself seen, in the very club in which he was now entertaining Softly Bishop, a man who had left an arm in France chatting and laughing with a man who had picked up over a million pounds by following the great principle that a commodity is worth what it will fetch when people want it very badly and there is a shortage of it. Mr. Prohack too had often chatted and laughed with this same picker-up of a million, who happened to be a quite jolly and generous fellow. Mr. Prohack would have chatted and laughed with Barabbas, convinced as he was that iniquity is the result of circumstances rather than of deliberate naughtiness. He seldom condemned. He had greatly liked Silas Angmering, who was a really educated and a well-intentioned man with a queer regrettable twist in his composition. That Silas should have profiteered when he got the chance was natural. Most men would do the same. Most heroes would do the same. The man with one arm would conceivably do the same.

But between excusing and forgiving a brigand (who has not despoiled _you_), and sharing his plunder, there was a gap, a chasm.

Few facts gave Mr. Prohack a more serene and proud satisfaction than the fact that he had materially lost through the war. He was positively glad that he had lost, and that the Government, his employer, had treated him badly.... And now to become the heir of a profiteer! Nor was that all! To become the co-heir with a woman of dubious renown, and with Mr. Softly Bishop! He knew nothing about the woman, and would think nothing. But he knew a little about Mr. Softly Bishop. Mr. Bishop, it used to be known and said in the club, had never had a friend. He had the usual number of acquaintances, but no relationship more intimate. Mr. Prohack, in the old days, had not for a long time actively disliked Mr. Bishop; but he had been surprised at the amount of active dislike which contact with Mr. Bishop engendered in other members of the club. Why such dislike? Was it due to his fat, red face, his spectacles, his conspiratorial manner, tone and gait, the evenness of his temper, his cautiousness, his mysteriousness? Nobody knew. In the end Mr. Prohack also had succeeded in disliking him. But Mr. Prohack produced a reason, and that reason was Mr. Bishop's first name. On it being pointed out to Mr. Prohack by argufiers that Mr. Bishop was not responsible for his first name, Mr. Prohack would reply that the mentality of parents capable of bestowing on an innocent child the Christian name of Softly was incomprehensible and in a high degree suspicious, and that therefore by the well-known laws of heredity there must be something devilish odd in the mentality of their offspring--especially seeing that the offspring pretended to glory in the Christian name as being a fine old English name. No! Mr. Prohack might stomach co-heirship with a far-off dubious woman; but could he stomach co-heirship with Softly Bishop? It would necessitate friendship with Mr. Bishop. It would bracket him for ever with Mr. Bishop.

These various considerations, however, had little to do with the immense inward anarchy that Mr. Prohack's tone had concealed as he musingly murmured: "Do I really?" The disturbance was due almost exclusively to a fierce imperial joy in the prospect of immediate wealth. The origin of the wealth scarcely affected him. The associations of the wealth scarcely affected him. He understood in a flash the deep wisdom of that old proverb (whose truth he had often hitherto denied) that money has no smell. Perhaps there might be forty good reasons against his accepting the inheritance, but they were all ridiculous. Was he to abandon his share of the money to Softly Bishop and the vampire-woman? Such a notion was idiotic. It was contrary to the robust and matter-of-fact commonsense which always marked his actions--if not his theories. No more should his wife be compelled to scheme out painfully the employment of her housekeeping allowance. Never again should there be a question about a new frock for his daughter. He was conscious, before anything else, of a triumphant protective and spoiling tenderness for his women. He would be absurd with his women. He would ruin their characters with kindness and with invitations to be capricious and exacting and expensive and futile. They nobly deserved it. He wanted to shout and to sing and to tell everybody that he would not in future stand any d----d nonsense from anybody. He would have his way.

"Why!" thought he, pulling himself up. "I've developed all the peculiarities of a millionaire in about a minute and a half."

And again, he cried to himself, in the vast and imperfectly explored jungle that every man calls his heart:

"Ah! I could not have borne to give up either of my clubs! No! I was deceiving myself. I could not have done it! I could not have done it! Anything rather than that. I see it now.... By the way, I wonder what all the fellows will say when they know! And how shall I break it to them? Not to-day! Not to-day! To-morrow!"

At the moment when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty called him elsewhere.

"Does that matter--now?" said Bishop, and his accents were charged with meaning.

Mr. Prohack saw that it did not matter, and that in future any nation that did not like his office-hours would have to lump them. He feared greatly lest he might encounter some crony-member on his way out of the club with Bishop. If he did, what should he say, how should he carry off the situation? (For he was feeling mysteriously guilty, just as he had felt guilty an hour earlier. Not guilty as the inheritor of profiteering in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor. It might have been different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say of five thousand pounds every six months. But a hundred thousand unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still in the smoking-room. He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly. Bishop had a big motor-car waiting at the door.


III


He offered no remark as to the car, and Mr. Prohack offered no remark. But Mr. Prohack was very interested in the car--he who had never been interested in cars. And he was interested in the clothes and in the deportment of the chauffeur. He was indeed interested in all sorts of new things. The window of a firm of house-agents who specialised in country houses, the jewellers' shops, the big hotels, the advertisements of theatres and concerts, the establishments of trunk-makers and of historic second-hand booksellers and of equally historic wine-merchants. He saw them all with a fresh eye. London suddenly opened to him its possibilities as a bud opens its petals.

"Not a bad car they; hired out to me," said Bishop at length, with casual approval.

"You've hired it?"

"Oh, yes!"

And shortly afterwards Bishop said:

"It's fantastic the number of cars there are in use in America. You know it's a literal fact that almost every American family has a car. For instance, whenever there's a big meeting of strikers in New York, all the streets near the hall are blocked with cars."

Mr. Prohack had food for reflection. His outlook upon life