CHARLIE
I
When Mr. Prohack, in his mature but still rich velvet jacket, came down
to dinner, he found his son Charlie leaning against the mantelpiece in a
new dark brown suit, and studying _The Owner-Driver_. Charlie seemed
never to read anything but motor-car and light-car and side-car and
motor-bicycle periodical literature; but he read it conscientiously,
indefatigably, and completely--advertisements and all. He read it as
though it were an endless novel of passion and he an idle woman deprived
of the society her heart longed for. He possessed a motor-bicycle which
he stabled in a mews behind the Square. He had possessed several such
machines; he bought, altered, and sold them, apparently always with
profit to himself. He had no interest in non-mechanical literature or in
any of the arts.
"Your mother's gone to bed with a headache," said Mr. Prohack, with a
fair imitation of melancholy.
"Oh!" said the young man apathetically. His face had a wearied,
disillusioned expression.
"Is this the latest?" asked his father, indicating the new brown suit.
"My respectful congratulations. Very smart, especially at the waist."
For a youth who had nothing in the world but what remained of his wound
gratuity and other trifling military emoluments, and what he made out of
commerce in motor-bicycles, Charlie spent a lot in clothes. His mother
had advised his father to "speak to him about it." But his father had
declined to offer any criticism, on the ground that Charlie had fought
in Mesopotamia, Italy and France. Moreover, Charlie had scotched any
possible criticism by asserting that good clothes were all that stood
between him and the ruin of his career. "If I dressed like the dad," he
had once grimly and gloomily remarked, "it would be the beginning of the
end for me."
"Smart?" he now exclaimed, stepping forward. "Look at that." He advanced
his right leg a little. "Look at that crease. See where it falls?" The
trouser-crease, which, as all wise men know, ought to have fallen
exactly on the centre of the boot-lacing, fell about an inch to the left
thereof. "And I've tried this suit on four times! All the bally tailors
in London seem to think you've got nothing else to do but call and try
on and try on and try on. Never seems to occur to them that they don't
know their business. It's as bad as staff work. However, if this fellow
thinks I'm going to stick these trousers he'll have the surprise of his
life to-morrow morning." The youth spoke in a tone of earnest disgust.
"My boy," said Mr. Prohack, "you have my most serious sympathy. Your
life must be terribly complicated by this search for perfection."
"Yes, that's all very well," said Charlie.
"Where's Sissie?"
"Hanged if I know!"
"I heard her playing the piano not five minutes since."
"So did I."
Machin, the house-parlourmaid, then intervened:
"Miss Sissie had a telephone call, and she's gone out, sir."
"Where to?"
"She didn't say, sir. She only said she wouldn't be in for dinner, sir.
I made sure she'd told you herself, sir."
The two men, by means of their eyes, transmitted to each other a
unanimous judgment upon the whole female sex, and sat down to dine alone
in the stricken house. The dinner was extremely frugal, this being the
opening day of Mrs. Prohack's new era of intensive economy, but the
obvious pleasure of Machin in serving only men brightened up somewhat
its brief course. Charlie was taciturn and curt, though not impolite.
Mr. Prohack, whose private high spirits not even the amazing and
inexcusable absence of his daughter could impair, pretended to a decent
woe, and chatted as he might have done to a fellow-clubman on a wet
Sunday night at the Club.
At the end of the meal Charlie produced the enormous widow's cruse which
he called his cigarette-case and offered his father a cigarette.
"Doing anything to-night?" asked Mr. Prohack, puffing.
"No," answered desperately Charlie, puffing.
"Ring the bell, will you?"
While Charlie went to the mantelpiece Mr. Prohack secreted an apple for
his starving wife.
"Machin," said he to the incoming house-parlourmaid, "see if you can
find some port."
Charlie raised his fatigued eyebrows.
"Yes, sir," said the house-parlourmaid, vivaciously, and whisked away
her skirts, which seemed to remark:
"You're quite right to have port. I feel very sorry for you two
attractive gentlemen taking a poor dinner all alone."
Charlie drank his port in silence and Mr. Prohack watched him.
* * * * *
II
Mr. Prohack's son was, in some respects, a great mystery to him. He
could not understand, for instance, how his own offspring could be so
unresponsive to the attractions of the things of the mind, and so
interested in mere machinery and the methods of moving a living or a
lifeless object from one spot on the earth's surface to another. Mr.
Prohack admitted the necessity of machinery, but an automobile had for
him the same status as a child's scooter and no higher. It was an
ingenious device for locomotion. And there for him the matter ended. On
the other hand, Mr. Prohack sympathised with and comprehended his son's
general attitude towards life. Charlie had gone to war from Cambridge at
the age of nineteen. He went a boy, and returned a grave man. He went
thoughtless and light-hearted, and returned full of magnificent and
austere ideals. Six months of England had destroyed these ideals in him.
He had expected to help in the common task of making heaven in about a
fortnight. In the war he had learnt much about the possibilities of
human nature, but scarcely anything about its limitations. His father
tried to warn him, but of course failed. Charlie grew resentful, then
cynical. He saw in England nothing but futility, injustice and
ingratitude. He refused to resume Cambridge, and was bitterly sarcastic
about the generosity of a nation which, through its War Office, was
ready to pay to studious warriors anxious to make up University terms
lost in a holy war decidedly less than it paid to its street-sweepers.
Having escaped from death, the aforesaid warriors were granted the right
to starve their bodies while improving their minds. He might have had
sure situations in vast corporations. He declined them. He spat on them.
He called them "graves." What he wanted was an opportunity to fulfil
himself. He could not get it, and his father could not get it from him.
While searching for it, he frequently met warriors covered with ribbons
but lacking food and shelter not only for themselves but for their women
and children. All this, human nature being what it is, was inevitable,
but his father could not convincingly tell him so. All that Mr. Prohack
could effectively do Mr. Prohack did,--namely, provide the saviour of
Britain with food and shelter. Charlie was restlessly and dangerously
waiting for his opportunity. But he had not developed into a
revolutionist, nor a communist, nor anything of the sort. Oh, no! Quite
the reverse. He meditated a different revenge on society.
Mr. Prohack knew nothing of this meditated revenge, did not suspect it.
If he had suspected it, he might have felt less compassion than, on this
masculine evening with the unusual port, he did in fact feel. For he was
very sorry for Charlie. He longed to tell him about the fortune, and to
exult with him in the fortune, and to pour, as it were, the fortune into
his lap. He did not care a fig, now, about advisable precautions. He did
not feel the slightest constraint at the prospect of imparting the
tremendous and gorgeous news to his son. He had no desire to reflect
upon the proper method of telling. He merely and acutely wanted to tell,
so that he might see the relief and the joyous anticipation on his son's
enigmatic and melancholy face. But he could not tell because it had been
tacitly agreed with his wife that he should not tell in her absence.
True, he had given no verbal promise, but he had given something just as
binding.
"Nothing exciting to-day, I suppose," he said, when the silence had
begun to distress him in his secret glee.
"No," Charlie replied. "I got particulars of an affair at Glasgow, but
it needs money."
"What sort of an affair?"
"Oh! Rather difficult to explain. Buying and selling. Usual thing."
"What money is needed?"
"I should say three hundred or thereabouts. Might as well be three
thousand so far as I'm concerned."
"Where did you hear of it?"
"Club."
Charlie belonged to a little club in Savile Place where young warriors
told each other what they thought of the nature of society.
Mr. Prohack drew in his breath with an involuntary gasp, and then said:
"I expect I could let you have three hundred."
"_You couldn't!_"
"I expect I could." Mr. Prohack had never felt so akin to a god. It
seemed to him that he was engaged in the act of creating a future, yea,
a man. Charlie's face changed. He had been dead. He was now suddenly
alive.
"When?"
"Well, any time."
"Now?"
"Why not?"
Charlie looked at his watch.
"Well, I'm much obliged," he said.
* * * * *
III
Mr. Prohack had brought a new cheque-book from the Bank. It lay in his
hip-pocket. He had no alternative but to write out a cheque. Three
hundred pounds would nearly exhaust his balance, but that did not
matter. He gave Charlie the cheque. Charlie offered no further
information concerning the "affair" for which the money was required.
And Mr. Prohack did not choose to enquire. Perhaps he was too proud to
enquire. The money would probably be lost. And if it were lost no harm
would be done. Good, rather, for Charlie would have gained experience.
The lad was only a child, after all.
The lad ran upstairs, and Mr. Prohack sat solitary in delightful
meditation. After a few minutes the lad re-appeared in hat and coat. Mr.
Prohack thought that he had heard a bag dumped in the hall.
"Where are you off to?" he asked.
"Glasgow. I shall catch the night-train."
He rang the bell.
"Machin, run out and get me a taxi, sharp."
"Yes, sir." Machin flew. This was the same girl of whom Mrs. Prohack
dared to demand nothing. Mr. Prohack himself would have hesitated to
send her for a taxi. But Charlie ordered her about like a slave and she
seemed to like it.
"Rather sudden this, isn't it?" said Mr. Prohack, extremely startled by
the turn of events.
"Well, you've got to be sudden in this world, guv'nor," Charlie replied,
and lit a fresh cigarette.
Mr. Prohack was again too proud to put questions. Still, he did venture
upon one question:
"Have you got loose money for your fare?"
The lad laughed. "Oh, don't let that worry you, guv'nor...!" He looked
at his watch once more. "I wonder whether that infernal girl is
manufacturing that taxi or only fetching it."
"What must I say to your mother?" demanded Mr. Prohack.
"Give her my respectful regards."
The taxi was heard. Machin dashed into the house, and dashed out again
with the bag. The lad clasped his father's hand with a warm vigour that
pleased and reassured Mr. Prohack in his natural bewilderment. It was
not consistent with the paternal dignity to leave the dining-room and
stand, valedictory, on the front-doorstep.
"Well, I'm dashed!" Mr. Prohack murmured to himself as the taxi drove
away. And he had every right to be dashed.