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

extraordinary case of rejuvenescence. He surveyed the room with triumph. He sniffed up the brassy and clicking music into his vibrating nostrils. He felt no envy of any man in the room. When the band paused he clapped like a child for another dose of fox-trot. At the end of the third dose they were both a little breathless and they had ices. After a waltz they both realised that excess would be imprudent, and returned to the lounge.

"I wish you'd tell me something about my son," said Mr. Prohack. "I think you must be the greatest living authority on him."

"Here?" exclaimed Lady Massulam.

"Anywhere. Any time."

"It would be safer at my house," said Lady Massulam. "But before I go I must just write a little note to Lord Partick. He will expect it."

That was how she invited him to The Lone Cedar, the same being her famous bungalow on the Front.


IV


"Your son," said Lady Massulam, in a familiar tone, but most reassuringly like an aunt of Charlie's, after she had explained how they had met in Glasgow through being distantly connected by the same business deal, and how she had been impressed by Charlie's youthful capacity, "your son has very great talent for big affairs, but he is now playing a dangerous game--far more dangerous than he imagines, and he will not be warned. He is selling something he hasn't got before he knows what price he will have to pay for it."

"Ah!" breathed Mr. Prohack.

They were sitting together in the richly ornamented bungalow drawing-room, by the fire. Lady Massulam sat up straight Sn her sober and yet daring evening frock. Mr. Prohack lounged with formless grace in a vast easy-chair neighbouring a whiskey-and-soda. She had not asked him to smoke; he did not smoke, and he had no wish to smoke. She was a gorgeously mature specimen of a woman. He imagined her young, and he decided that he preferred the autumn to the spring. She went on talking of finance.

"She is moving in regions that Eve can never know," he thought. "But how did Eve perceive that she had taken a fancy to me?"

The alleged danger to Charlie scarcely disturbed him. Her appreciation or depreciation of Charlie interested him only in so far as it was a vehicle for the expression of her personality. He had never met such a woman. He responded to her with a vivacity that surprised himself. He looked surreptitiously round the room, brilliantly lighted here, and there obscure, and he comprehended how every detail of its varied sumptuosity aptly illustrated her mind and heart. His own heart was full of quite new sensations.

"Of course," she was saying, "if Charles is to become the really great figure that he might be, he will have to cure his greatest fault, and perhaps it is incurable."

"I know what that is," said Mr. Prohack, softly but positively.

"What is it?" Her glance met his.

"His confounded reserve, lack of elasticity, lack of adaptability. The old British illusion that everything will come to him who won't budge. Why, it's a ten-horse-power effort for him even to smile!"

Lady Massulam seemed to leap from her chair, and she broke swiftly into French:

"Oh! You comprehend then, you? If you knew what I have suffered in your terrible England! But you do not suspect what I have suffered! I advance myself. They retire before me. I advance myself again. They retire again. I open. They close. Do they begin? Never! It is always I who must begin! Do I make a natural gesture--they say to themselves, 'What a strange woman! How indiscreet! But she is foreign.' They lift their shoulders. Am I frank--they pity me. They give themselves never! They are shut like their lips over their long teeth. Ah, but they have taught me. In twenty years have I not learnt the lesson? There is nobody among you who can be more shut-tight than me. I flatter myself that I can be more terrible than any English woman or man. You do not catch me now! But what a martyrdom!... I might return to France? No! I am become too English. In Paris I should resemble an _emigree_. And people would say: 'What is that? It is like nothing at all. It has no name.' Besides, I like you English. You are terrible, but one can count on you.... _Vous y etes?_"

"_J'y suis_," replied Mr. Prohack, ravished.

Lady Massulam in her agitation picked up the tumbler and sipped.

"Pardon!" she cried, aghast. "It is yours," and planked the tumbler down again on the lacquered table.

Mr. Prohack had the wit to drink also. They went on talking.... A silver tongue vibrated from the hall with solemn British deliberation--One! Two! The air throbbed to the sound for many seconds.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack, rising in alarm. "And this is Frinton!" She let him out herself, with all soft precautions against shocking the Frintonian world. His manner of regaining the Majestic Hotel can only be described by saying that he 'effected an entrance' into it. He went to bed but not to sleep.

"What the deuce has happened to me?" he asked himself amazed. "Is it anything serious? Or am I merely English after all?"


V


Late the next morning, when he was dreaming, a servant awoke him with the information that a chauffeur was demanding him. But he was sleepy and slept again. Between noon and one o'clock he encountered the chauffeur. It was Carthew, who stated that his mistress had sent him with the car. She felt that he would need the car to go about in. As for her, she would manage without it.

Mr. Prohack remained silent for a few moments and then said:

"Be ready to start in a quarter of an hour."

"Before lunch, sir?"

"Before lunch."

Mr. Prohack paid his bill and packed.

"Which way, sir?" Carthew asked, as the Eagle moved from under the portico of the hotel.

"There is only one road out of Frinton," said Mr. Prohack. "It's the road you came in by. Take it. I want to get off as quickly as possible. The climate of this place is the most dangerous and deceptive I was ever in."

"Really, sir!" responded Carthew, polite but indifferent. "The east wind I suppose, sir?"

"Not at all. The south wind."


CHAPTER XVIII


A HOMELESS NIGHT

I


How exhilarating (Mr. Prohack found it) to be on the road without a destination! It was Sunday morning, and the morning was marvellous for the time of year. Mr. Prohack had had a very fine night, and he now felt a curious desire to defy something or somebody, to defend himself, and to point out, if any one accused him of cowardice, that he had not retreated from danger until after he had fairly affronted it. More curious still was the double, self-contradictory sensation of feeling both righteous and sinful. He would have spurned a charge of wickedness, and yet the feeling of being wicked was really very jolly. He seemed to have begun a new page of life, and then to have ripped the page away--and possibly spoilt the whole book. Deference to Eve, of course! Respect for Eve! Or was it merely that he must always be able to look Eve in the face? In sending the car for his idle use, Eve had performed a master-stroke which laid him low by its kindliness, its wifeliness, its touches of perverse self-sacrifice and of vague, delicate malice. Lady Massulam hung in the vast hollow of his mind, a brilliant and intensely seductive figure; but Eve hung there too, and Mr. Prohack was obliged to admit that the simple Eve was holding her own.

"My sagacity is famous," said Mr. Prohack to himself. "And I never showed more of it than in leaving Frinton instantly. Few men would have had the sense and the resolution to do it." And he went on praising himself to himself. Such was the mood of this singular man.

Hunger--Mr. Prohack's hunger--drew them up at Frating, a village a few miles short of Colchester. The inn at Frating had been constructed ages earlier entirely without reference to the fact that it is improper for certain different types of humanity to eat or drink in each other's presence. In brief, there was obviously only one dining-room, and not a series of dining-rooms classified according to castes. Mr. Prohack, free, devil-may-care and original, said to his chauffeur:

"You'd better eat with me, Carthew."

"You're very kind, sir," said Carthew, and at once sat down and ceased to be a chauffeur.

"Well, I haven't been seeing much of you lately," Mr. Prohack edged forward into the fringes of intimacy when three glasses of beer and three slices of Derby Round had been unequally divided between them, "have I?"

"No, sir."

Mr. Prohack had in truth been seeing Carthew almost daily; but on this occasion he used the word "see" in a special sense.

"That boy of yours getting on all right?"

"Pretty fair, considering he's got no mother, if you understand what I mean, sir," replied Carthew, pushing back his chair, stretching out his legs, and picking his teeth with a fork.

"Ah! yes!" said Mr. Prohack commiseratingly. "Very awkward situation for you, that is."

"It isn't awkward for me, sir. It's my boy it's awkward for. I'm as right as rain."

"No chance of the lady coming back, I suppose?"

"Well, she'd better not try," said Carthew grimly.

"But does this mean you've done with the sex, at your age?" cried Mr. Prohack.

"I don't say as I've _done_ with the sex, sir. Male and female created He them, as the good old Book says; and I'm not going behind that. No, not me! All I say is, I'm as right as rain--_for_ the present--and she'd better not try."

"I bet you anything you won't keep it up," said Mr. Prohack, impetuously exceeding the limits of inter-caste decorum.

"Keep what up?"

"This attitude of yours."

"I won't bet, sir," said Carthew. "Because nobody can see round a corner. But I promise you I'll never take a woman _seriously_ again. That's the mistake we make, taking 'em seriously. You see, sir, being a chauffeur in the early days of motor-cars, I've had a tidy bit of experience, if you understand what I mean. Because in them days a chauffeur was like what an air-pilot is to-day. He didn't have to ask, he didn't. And what I say is this--I say we're mugs to take 'em seriously."

"You think we are!" bubbled Mr. Prohack emptily, perceiving that he had to do with an individual whom misfortune had rendered impervious to argument.

"I do, sir. And what's more, I say you never know where you are with any woman."

"That I agree with," said Mr. Prohack, with a polite show of eagerness. "But you're cutting yourself off from a great deal you know, Carthew," he added, thinking magnificently upon his adventure with Lady Massulam.

"There's a rare lot as would like to be in my place," murmured Carthew with bland superiority. "If it's all the same to you, sir, I'll just go and give her a look over before we start again." He scraped his chair cruelly over the wood floor, rose, and ceased to be an authority on women.

It was while exercising his privilege of demanding, awaiting, and paying the bill, that Mr. Prohack happened to see, at the