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

Prohack admitted, quite truthfully.

He saw that he ought to have been gravely upset by Sissie'a prank and he was merely amused. "Effect of too much sleep, no doubt," he added.

Eve walked about the room.

"I pretended to Machin this morning that Sissie had told me that she was sleeping out, and that I had forgotten to tell Machin. It's a good thing we haven't engaged lady's maids yet. I can trust Machin. I know she didn't believe me this morning, but I can trust her. You see, after Sissie's strange behaviour these last few days.... One doesn't know what to think. And there's something else. Every morning for the last three or four weeks Sissie's gone out somewhere, for an hour or two, quite regularly. And where she went I've never been able to find out. Of course with a girl like her it doesn't do to ask too direct questions.... Ah! I should like to have seen my mother in my place. I know what she'd have done!"

"What would your mother have done? She always seemed to me to be a fairly harmless creature."

"Yes, to you!... Do you think we ought to inform the police!"

"No!"

"I'm so glad. The necklace and Sissie coming on top of each other! No, it would be too much!"

"It never rains but it pours, does it?" observed Mr. Prohack.

"But what _are_ we to do?"

"Just what your mother would have done. Your mother would have argued like this: Either Sissie is staying away against her will or she is staying away of her own accord. If the former, it means an accident, and we are bound to hear shortly from one of the hospitals. If the latter, we can only sit tight. Your mother had a vigorous mind and that is how she would have looked at things."

"I never know how to take you, Arthur," said Mrs. Prohack, and went on: "And what makes it all the more incomprehensible IA that yesterday afternoon Sissie went with me to Jay's to see about the wedding-dress."

"But why should that make it all the more incomprehensible?"

"Don't you think it does, somehow? I do."

"Did she giggle at Jay's?"

"Oh, no! Except once. Yes, I think she giggled once. That was when the fitter said she hoped we should give them plenty of time, because most customers rushed them so. I remember thinking how queer it was that Sissie should laugh so much at a perfectly simple remark like that. Oh! Arthur!"

"Now, my child," said Mr. Prohack firmly. "Don't get into your head that Sissie has gone off hers. Yesterday you thought for quite half an hour that I was suffering from incipient lunacy. Let that suffice you for the present. Be philosophical. The source of tranquillity is within. Remember that, and remind me of it too, because I'm apt to forget it.... We can do nothing at the moment. I will now get up, and I warn you that I shall want a large breakfast and you to pour out my coffee and read the interesting bits out of _The Daily Picture_ to me."

At eleven o'clock of the morning the _status quo_ was still maintaining itself within the noble mansion at Manchester Square. Mr. Prohack, washed, dressed, and amply fed, was pretending to be very busy with correspondence in his study, but he was in fact much more busy with Eve than with the correspondence. She came in to him every few minutes, and each time needed more delicate handling. After one visit Mr. Prohack had an idea. He transferred the key from the inside to the outside of the door. At the next visit Eve presented an ultimatum. She said that Mr. Prohack must positively do something about his daughter. Mr. Prohack replied that he would telephone to his solicitors: a project which happily commended itself to Eve, though what his solicitors could do except charge a fee Mr. Prohack could not imagine.

"You wait here," said he persuasively.

He then left the room and silently locked the door on Eve. It was a monstrous act, but Mr. Prohack had slept too well and was too fully inspired by the instinct of initiative. He hurried downstairs, ignoring Brool, who was contemplating the grandeur of the entrance hall, snatched his overcoat, hat, and umbrella from the seventeenth-century panelled cupboard in which these articles were kept, and slipped away into the Square, before Brool could even open the door for him. As he fled he glanced up at the windows of his study, fearful lest Eve might have divined his purpose to abandon her and, catching sight of him in flight, might begin making noises on the locked door. But Eve had not divined his purpose.

Mr. Prohack walked straight to Bruton Street, where Oswald Morfey's Japanese flat was situated. Mr. Prohack had never seen this flat, though his wife and daughter had been invited to it for tea--and had returned therefrom with excited accounts of its exquisite uniqueness. He had decided that his duty was to inform Ozzie of the mysterious disappearance of Sissie as quickly as possible; and, as Ozzie's theatrical day was not supposed to begin until noon, he hoped to catch him before his departure to the beck and call of the mighty Asprey Chown.

The number in Bruton Street indicated a tall, thin house with four bell-pushes and four narrow brass-plates on its door-jamb. The deceitful edifice looked at a distance just like its neighbours, but, as the array on the door-jamb showed, it had ceased to be what it seemed, the home of a respectable Victorian family in easy circumstances, and had become a Georgian warren for people who could reconcile themselves to a common staircase provided only they might engrave a sound West End address on their notepaper. The front-door was open, disclosing the reassuring fact that the hall and staircase were at any rate carpeted. Mr. Prohack rang the bell attached to Ozzie's name, waited, rang again, waited, and then marched upstairs. Perhaps Ozzie was shaving. Not being accustomed to the organisation of tenements in fashionable quarters, Mr. Prohack was unaware that during certain hours of the day he was entitled to ring the housekeeper's bell, on the opposite door-jamb, and to summon help from the basement.

As he mounted it the staircase grew stuffier and stuffier, but the condition of the staircarpet improved. Mr. Prohack hated the place, and at once determined to fight powerfully against Sissie's declared intention of starting married life in her husband's bachelor-flat, for the sake of economy. He would force the pair, if necessary, to accept from him a flat rent-free, or he would even purchase for them one of those bijou residences of which he had heard tell. He little dreamed that this very house had once been described as a bijou residence. The third floor landing was terribly small and dark, and Mr. Prohack could scarcely decipher the name of his future son-in-law on the shabby name-plate.

"This den would be dear at elevenpence three farthings a year," said he to himself, and was annoyed because for months he had been picturing the elegant Oswald as the inhabitant of something orientally and impeccably luxurious, and he wondered that his women, as a rule so critical, had breathed no word of the flat's deplorable approaches.

He rang the bell, and the bell made a violent and horrid sound, which could scarcely fail to be heard throughout the remainder of the house. No answer! Ozzie had gone. He descended the stairs, and on the second-floor landing saw an old lady putting down a mat in front of an open door. The old lady's hair was in curl-papers.

"I suppose," he ventured, raising his hat. "I suppose you don't happen to know whether Mr. Morfey has gone out?"

The old lady scanned him before replying.

"He can't be gone out," she answered. "He's just been sweeping his floor enough to wake the dead."

"Sweeping his floor!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack, shocked, thunderstruck. "I understood these were service flats."

"So they are--in a way, but the housekeeper never gets up to this floor before half past twelve; so it can't be the housekeeper. Besides, she's gone out for me."

"Thank you," said Mr. Prohack, and remounted the staircase. His blood was up. He would know the worst about the elegant Oswald, even if he had to beat the door down. He was, however, saved from this extreme measure, for when he aimlessly pushed against Oswald's door it opened.

He beheld a narrow passage, which in the matter of its decoration certainly did present a Japanese aspect to Mr. Prohack, who, however, had never been to Japan. Two doors gave off the obscure corridor. One of these doors was open, and in the doorway could be seen the latter half of a woman and the forward half of a carpet-brush. She was evidently brushing the carpet of a room and gradually coming out of the room and into the passage. She wore a large blue pinafore apron, and she was so absorbed in her business that the advent of Mr. Prohack passed quite unnoticed by her. Mr. Prohack waited. More of the woman appeared, and at last the whole of her. She felt, rather than saw, the presence of a man at the entrance, and she looked up, transfixed. A deep blush travelled over all her features.

"How clever of you!" she said, with a fairly successful effort to be calm.

"Good morning, my child," said Mr. Prohack, with a similar and equally successful effort. "So you're cleaning Mr. Morfey's flat for him."

"Yes. And not before it needed it. Do come in and shut the door." Mr. Prohack obeyed, and Sissie shed her pinafore apron. "Now we're quite private. I think you'd better kiss me. I may as well tell you that I'm fearfully happy--much more so than I expected to be at first."

Mr. Prohack again obeyed, and when he kissed his daughter he had an almost entirely new sensation. The girl was far more interesting to him than she had ever been. Her blush thrilled him.

"You might care to glance at that," said Sissie, with an affectation of carelessness, indicating a longish, narrowish piece of paper covered with characters in red and black, which had been affixed to the wall of the passage with two pins. "We put it there--at least I did--to save trouble."

Mr. Prohack scanned the document. It began: "This is to certify--" and it was signed by a "Registrar of births, deaths, and marriages."

"Yesterday, eh?" he ejaculated.

"Yes. Yesterday, at two o'clock. _Not_ at St George's and _not_ at St Nicodemus's.... Well, you can say what you like, dad--"

"I'm not aware of having said anything yet," Mr. Prohack put in.

"You can say what you like, but what _did_ you expect me to do? It was necessary to bring home to some people that this is the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, and I think I've done it. And anyway what are you going to do about it? Did you seriously suppose that I--_I_--was going through all the orange-blossom rigmarole, voice that breathed o'er Eden, fully choral, red carpet on the pavement, flowers, photographers, vicar, vestry, _Daily Picture_, reception, congratulations, rice, old shoes, going-away dress, 'Be kind to her, Ozzie.' Not much! And I don't think. They say that girls love it and insist on it. Well, I don't, and I know some others who don't, too. I think it's simply barbaric, worse than a public funeral. Why, to my mind it's Central African; and that's all there is to it. So there!" She laughed.