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

to change for the day. May I sit down?"

Mr. Prohack nodded. Indubitably she made a wonderful sight in her daring splendour.

"So you've found out all about it already!" said she, still meekly, while Mr. Prohack was seeking the right gambit. "Please do tell me how," she added, disposing the folds of her short skirt about the chair.

"I'm not here to answer questions," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm here to ask them. How did you do it? And was it you or Charlie or both of you? Whose idea was it?"

"It was my idea," Mimi purred. "But Mr. Charles seemed to like it. It was really very simple. We first of all found out about the sexton."

"And how did you do that?"

"Private enquiry agents, of course. Same people who were in charge here last night. I knew of them when I was with Mr. Carrel Quire, and it was I who introduced them to Mrs. Prohack."

"It would be!" Mr. Prohack commented. "And then?"

"And then when we'd discovered Mrs. Slipstone--or Miss Slipstone--"

"Who's she?"

"She's a rather stout charwoman who has a fascination for the sexton of St. Nicodemus. When I'd got her it was all plain sailing. She lent me the church keys and Mr. Charles and I went up the tower to reconnoitre."

"But that was more than twenty-four hours before the clock ceased to strike, and you returned the keys to her."

"Oh! So you know that too, do you?" said Mimi blandly. "Mr. Prohack, I hope you'll forgive me for saying that you're most frightfully clever. I _did_ give the keys back to Mrs. Slipstone a long time before the clock stopped striking, but you see, Mr. Charles had taken an impression of the tower key in clay, so that last night we were able to go up with an electric torch and our own key. The clock is a very old one, and Mr. Charles removed a swivel or something--I forget what he called it, but he seems to understand everything about every kind of machinery. He says it would take a tremendous long time to get another swivel, or whatever it is, cast, even if it ever could be cast without a pattern, and that you'll be safe for at least six months, even if we don't rely on the natural slowness of the Established Church to do anything really active. You see it isn't as if the clock wasn't going. It's showing the time all right, and that will be sufficient to keep the rector and the church-wardens quiet. It keeps up appearances. Of course if the clock had stopped entirely they would have had to do something.... You don't seem very pleased, dear Mr. Prohack. We thought you'd be delighted. We did it all for you."

"Did you indeed!" said Mr. Prohack ruthlessly. "And did you think of the riskiness of what you were doing? There'll be a most appalling scandal, certainly police-court proceedings, and I shall be involved, if it comes to light."

"But it can't come to light!" Mimi exploded.

"And yet it came to my light."

"Yes, I expect Mr. Charles was so proud that he couldn't help telling you some bits about it. But nobody else can know. Even if Mrs. Slipstone lets on to the sexton, the sexton will never let on because if he did he'd lose his place. The sexton will always have to deny that he parted with the keys even for a moment. It will be the loveliest mystery that ever was, and all the police in the world won't solve it. Of course, if you aren't pleased, I'm very sorry."

"It isn't a question of not being pleased. The breath is simply knocked out of me--that's what it is! Whatever possessed you to do it?"

"But something had to be done, Mr. Prohack. Everybody in the house was terribly upset about you. You couldn't sleep because of the clock, and you said you never would sleep. Mrs. Prohack was at her wit's end."

"Everybody in the house was terribly upset about me! This is the first I've heard of anybody being terribly upset about me. I thought that everybody except me had forgotten all about the infernal clock."

"Naturally!" said Mimi, with soothing calmness. "Mrs. Prohack quite rightly forbade any mention of the clock in your presence. She said the best thing to do was to help you to forget it by never referring to it, and we all agreed with her. But it weighed on us dreadfully. And something really had to be done."

Mr. Prohack was not unimpressed by this revelation of the existence of a social atmosphere which he had never suspected. But he was in no mood for compromise.

"Now just listen to me," said he. "You are without exception the most dangerous woman that I have ever met. All women are dangerous, but you are an acute peril."

"Yes," Mimi admitted, "Mr. Carrel Quire used to talk like that. I got quite used to it."

"Did he really? Well, I think all the better of him, then. The mischief with you is that your motives are good. But a good motive is no excuse for a criminal act, and still less excuse for an idiotic act. I don't suppose I shall do any good by warning you, yet I do hereby most solemnly warn you to mend your ways. And I wish you to understand clearly that I am not a bit grateful to you. In fact the reverse."

Mimi stiffened herself.

"Perhaps you would prefer us to restore the missing part and start the clock striking again. It would be perfectly easy. We still have our own key to the tower and we could do it to-night. I am sure it will be at least a week before the church-wardens send an expert clock-maker up the tower."

In that moment Mr. Prohack had a distressing glimpse into the illogical peculiarities of the human conscience, especially his own. He knew that he ought to accept Mimi's offer, since it would definitely obviate the possible consequences of a criminal act and close a discreditable incident. But he thought of his bad nights instead of thinking of Mimi's morals and the higher welfare of society.

"No," he said. "Let sleeping clocks lie." And he saw that Mimi read the meanness of his soul and was silently greeting him as a fellow-sinner.

She surprised him by saying:

"I assure you, Mr. Prohack, that my sole idea--that our sole idea--was to make the house more possible for you." And as she uttered these words she gazed at him with a sort of delicious pouting, challenging reproach.

What a singular remark, he thought! It implied a comprehension of the fact, which he had considerately never disclosed, that he objected to the house _in toto_ and would have been happier in his former abode. And, curiously, it implied further that she comprehended and sympathised with his objections. She knew she had not done everything necessary to reconcile him to the noble mansion, but she had done what she could--and it was not negligible.

"Nothing of the kind," said he. "You simply had no 'sole idea.' When I admitted just now that your motives were good I was exaggerating. Your motives were only half good, and if you think otherwise you are deceiving yourself; you are not being realistic. In that respect you are no better than anybody else."

"What was my other motive, then?" she enquired submissively, as if appealing for information to the greatest living authority on the enigmas of her own heart.

"Your other motive was to satisfy your damnable instinct for dubious and picturesque adventure," said Mr. Prohack. "You were pandering to the evil in you. If you could have stopped the clock from striking by walking down Bond Street in Mrs. Slipstone's clothes and especially her boots, would you have done it? Certainly not. Of course you wouldn't. Don't try to come the self-sacrificing saint over me, because you can't do it."

These words, even if amounting to a just estimate of the situation, were ruthless and terrible. They might have accomplished some genuine and lasting good if Mr. Prohack had spoken them in a tone corresponding to their import. But he did not. His damnable instinct for pleasing people once more got the better of him, and he spoke them in a benevolent and paternal tone, his voice vibrating with compassion and with appreciation of her damnable instinct for dubious and picturesque adventure. The tone destroyed the significance of the words.

Moreover, not content with the falsifying tone, he rose up from his chair as he spoke, approached the charming and naughty girl, and patted her on the shoulder. The rebuke, indeed, ended by being more agreeable to the sinner than praise might have been from a man less corroded with duplicity than Mr. Prohack.

Mimi surprised him a second time.

"You're perfectly right," she said. "You always are." And she seized his limp hand in hers and kissed it,--and ran away, leaving him looking at the kissed hand.

Well, he was flattered, and he was pleased; or at any rate something in him, some fragmentary part of him, was flattered and pleased. Mimi's gesture was a triumph for a man nearing fifty; but it was an alarming triumph.... Odd that in that moment he should think of Lady Massulam! His fatal charm was as a razor. Had he been playing with it as a baby might play with a razor?... Popinjay? Coxcomb? Perhaps, Nevertheless, the wench had artistically kissed his hand, and his hand felt self-complacent, even if he didn't.

Brool, towards whom Mr. Prohack felt no impulse of good-will, came largely in with a salver on which were the morning letters and the morning papers, including the paper perused by Machin with her early bedside tea and doubtless carefully folded again in its original creases to look virginal.

The reappearance of that sheet had somewhat the quality of a sinister miracle to Mr. Prohack. He asked no questions about it so that he might be told no lies, but he searched it in vain for a trace of the suffering Machin. It was, however, full of typographical traces of himself and his family. The description of the reception was disturbingly journalistic, which adjective, for Mr. Prohack, unfortunately connoted the adjective vulgar. All the wrong people were in the list of guests, and all the decent quiet people were omitted. A value of twenty thousand pounds was put upon the necklace, contradicting another part of the report which stated the pearls to be "priceless." Mr. Prohack's fortune was referred to; also his Treasury past; the implication being that the fortune had caused him to leave the Treasury. His daughter's engagement to Mr. Morfey was glanced at; and it was remarked that Mr. Morfey--"known to all his friends and half London as 'Ozzie' Morfey"--was intimately connected with the greatest stage Napoleon in history, Mr. Asprey Chown. Finally a few words were given to Charlie; who was dubbed "a budding financier already responsible for one highly successful _coup_ and likely to be responsible for several others before much more water has run under the bridges of the Thames."

Mr. Prohack knew, then, in his limbs the meaning of the word "writhe," and he was glad that he had not had his bath, because even if he had had his bath he would have needed another one. His attitude towards his fellow men had a touch of embittered and cynical scorn unworthy of a philosopher. He turned, in another paper, to the financial column, for, though all his money was safe in fixed-interest-bearing