Success is a strong wine. It was running vividly in Dwala’s veins.
Every least thing he did seemed to him fate-ordered and conclusive. Oh,
the pride of it, the joy of it, the ease of it! The acclamations and
the consciousness of right!
The new Civilisation was like a poem, the scheme of which has come
whole and organic to the poet, and which germinates therefore without
constraint into its natural, necessary verses. The right men and the
right ideas fell of themselves into their places, like particles
forming a system of crystals. Dwala had found the basic idea, which
all this turbid mass had been so long awaiting. He created life and
received it. That same life flowed into his fibres, from the movement
of the multitude, which flows into the peasant-woman’s baby out of the
dust gathered on the busy highway.
Lady Wyse, seeing the easy joyful motion of his limbs and hearing the
deep vigour of his voice, put her presentiments away. Dwala himself
looked back in wonder at that grey mood when the world had faded from
him. He was like the traveller who stands in the garish whirl of the
fair, wondering if this can be the place that looked so grim on Sunday.
He was enjoying the strong rush of life which a kindly Heaven sends to
the consumptive as consolation for their early death.
He had new friends about him now. The Glendovers, the Disturnals, and
the rest of that crew had vanished into the Unknown; they were growing
turnips, shooting partridges, or riding on motor-ears somewhere in the
Outer Darkness. Hartopp and Prosser were still there; Joey had run
away to Seven Dials; Huxtable had packed his boxes, and stayed on in a
condition of provisional irresolution.
On Dwala’s third floor lived an ascetic pensioner--a certain Mr. Bone,
an American, a traveller in the East, a friend of Lady Wyse--connected
by some mystery of familiarity with Dwala’s past. Rumour had it that he
was an adventurer who had been Dwala’s Prime Minister in his days of
sovereignty.
Dwala’s palace, in fact, was fast turning into a monastery, where the
Abbot, with his little cell by the hall-door, was the least luxuriously
housed of all.
Prosser, as I said, was still there, but he was no longer there as
valet. The acceptance of such personal service was inconsistent
with the Prince’s New Humanity, and Prosser was quite incapable of
performing his duties properly. For some time he had contented himself
with a life of ease in his own room. But _his_ politics also had
changed: he did not see why he should be worse off than Hartopp, and,
by force of gradual asking, acquired the whole of the second floor,
over Hartopp, for his portion. He had everything he could think of
wanting in his rooms; but even that did not content him. He had thought
that wealth was all he needed to make him happy in his sober intervals;
but soon found out that he was mistaken. His career had given him a
longing for _other_ people’s property; things lost their interest for
him once they became his own. He craved for the excitements of the
past. Scissors, and ashtrays, and other glittering things got a way
of disappearing wherever he went about the house. One night Dwala was
aroused by the screaming of a police whistle from one of Hartopp’s
windows over him, and going up he found the Fence sitting on Prosser’s
chest in the window-seat, and blowing for all he was worth. A broken
cupboard and a trailing jemmy explained the situation.
‘All right, guvnor, I’ll go quietly,’ said Prosser, in a squeezed
husky voice; ‘I’m nabbed right enough this time.’ All the household
crowded in at the doorway with scared faces; policemen appeared,
and the alarm ended with the lights being turned up and everybody
sitting down together, policemen and all, to a scratch supper in the
dining-room, and laughing uproariously, as if something very funny had
occurred.
The best of Prosser was that he never made any unpleasantness about
being arrested. He would surrender at discretion to the housemaid or
the boot boy, and offer to ‘go quietly.’ The policemen outside entered
into the joke of it, and were ready on the doorstep to come in for
their supper and half-crown whenever the episcopal butler ran out of
a night--as he always did--to fetch them. The American was the only
one who missed the fun of the thing; he swore that if he found anyone
prowling about his rooms he would punch his head and hand him over, bag
and baggage, to the police.
Dwala himself was already tired of the joke, when the butler--rather
dishevelled--came in to the picture-gallery where he was pacing up
and down, one afternoon, with a sheaf of spoons in one hand and the
crestfallen Prosser in the other.
‘Why don’t you steal something big and have done with it?’ Dwala said,
when he and the ex-valet were left alone. ‘One of these pictures, for
instance; they’re very valuable some of them, I know. Now here’s a
tremendously fine thing, I’m told. Who’s it by? The name’s written on
the frame.’
‘Rubens, sir.’
‘Now you take that, Prosser, some night. I don’t want it a bit, I
assure you. It’s worth something like fifteen thousand pounds, I’m
told.’
Prosser returned it after a couple of days.
‘I can’t sleep with it in the room, I can’t, sir. When I shuts my eyes
I seems to see all them ladies rollin’ up and down and every way till
I’m fairly giddy. But I promise you, sir, I won’t go in no more for
little thievin’s, I’ll keep my eyes open for something big.’