COLLISION
I
After an eventful night Mr. Prohack woke up late to breakfast in bed.
Theoretically he hated breakfast in bed, but in practice he had recently
found that the inconveniences to himself were negligible compared to the
intense and triumphant pleasure which his wife took in seeing him
breakfast in bed, in being fully dressed while he was in pyjamas and
dressing-gown, and in presiding over the meal and over him. Recently
Marian had formed the habit of rising earlier and appearing to be very
busy upon various minute jobs at an hour when, a few weeks previously,
she would scarcely have decided that day had given place to night. Mr.
Prohack, without being able precisely to define it, thought that he
understood the psychology of the change in this unique woman. Under
ordinary circumstances he would have been worried by his sense of
fatigue, but now, as he had nothing whatever to do, he did not much care
whether he was tired or not. Neither the office nor the State would
suffer through his lack of tone.
The events of the night had happened exclusively inside Mr. Prohack's
head. Nor were they traceable to the demeanour of his wife when he
returned home from the studio. She had mysteriously behaved to him as
though nocturnal excursions to disgraceful daughters in remote quarters
of London were part of his daily routine. She had been very sweet and
very incurious. Whereon Mr. Prohack had said to himself: "She has some
diplomatic reason for being an angel." And even if she had not been an
angel, even if she had been the very reverse of an angel, Mr. Prohack
would not have minded, and his night would not have been thereby upset;
for he regarded her as a beautiful natural phenomenon is regarded by a
scientist, lovingly and wonderingly, and he was incapable of being
irritated for more than a few seconds by anything that might be done or
said by this forest creature of the prime who had strayed charmingly
into the twentieth century. He was a very fortunate husband.
No! The eventfulness of the night originated in reflection upon the
relations between Sissie and Ozzie Morfey. If thoughts could take
physical shape and solidity, the events of the night would have amounted
to terrible collisions and catastrophes in the devil-haunted abysses of
Mr. Prohack's brain. The forces of evil were massacring all opponents
between three and four a.m. It was at this period Mr. Prohack was
convinced that Sissie, in addition to being an indescribably heartless
daughter, was a perfect fool hoodwinked by a perfect ass, and that
Ozzie's motive in the affair was not solely or chiefly admiration for
Sissie, but admiration of the great fortune which, he had learnt, had
fallen into the lap of Sissie's father. After five o'clock, according to
the usual sequence, the forces of evil lost ground, and at six-thirty,
when the oblong of the looking-glass glimmered faintly in the dawn, Mr.
Prohack said roundly: "I am an idiot," and went to sleep.
"Now, darling," said Eve when he emerged from the bathroom. "Don't waste
any more time. I want you to give me your opinion about something
downstairs."
"Child," said Mr. Prohack. "What on earth do you mean--'wasting time'?
Haven't you insisted, and hasn't your precious doctor insisted, that I
must read the papers for an hour in bed after I've had my breakfast in
bed? Talk about 'wasting time' indeed!"
"Yes, of course darling," Eve concurred, amazingly angelic. "I don't
mean you've been wasting time; only I don't want you to waste any _more_
time."
"My mistake," said Mr. Prohack.
From mere malice and wickedness he spun out the business of dressing to
nearly its customary length, and twice Eve came uneasily into the
bedroom to see if she could be of assistance to him. No nurse could have
been so beautifully attentive. During one of her absences he slipped
furtively downstairs into the drawing-room, where he began to strum on
the piano, though the room was yet by no means properly warm. She came
after him, admirably pretending not to notice that he was behaving
unusually. She was attired for the street, and she carried his hat and
his thickest overcoat.
"You're coming out," said she, holding up the overcoat cajolingly.
"That's just where you're mistaken," said he.
"But I want to show you something."
"What do you want to show me?"
"You shall see when you come out."
"Is it by chance the bird of the mountains that I am to see?"
"The bird of the mountains? My dear Arthur! What are you driving at
now?"
"Is it the Eagle car?" And as she staggered speechless under the blow he
proceeded: "Ah! Did you think you could deceive _me_ with your infantile
conspiracies and your tacit deceits and your false smiles?"
She blushed.
"Some one's told you. And I do think it's a shame!"
"And who should have told me? Who have I seen? I suppose you think I
picked up the information at Putney last night. And haven't you opened
all my letters since I was ill, on the pretext of saving me worry? Shall
I tell you how I know? I knew from your face. Your face, my innocent,
can't be read like a book. It can be read like a newspaper placard, and
for days past I've seen on it, 'Extra special. Exciting purchase of a
motor-car by a cunning wife.'" Then he laughed. "No, chit. That fellow
Oswald Morfey, let it out last night."
When she had indignantly enquired how Oswald Morfey came to be mixed up
in her private matters, she said:
"Well, darling, I hope I needn't tell you that my _sole_ object was to
save you trouble. The car simply had to be bought, and as quickly as
possible, so I did it. Need I tell you--"
"You needn't, certainly," Mr. Prohack agreed, and going to the window he
lifted the curtain. Yes. There stood a real car, a landaulette, with the
illustrous eagle on the front of its radiator, and a real chauffeur by
its side. The thing seemed entirely miraculous to Mr. Prohack; and he
was rather impressed by his wife's daring and enterprise. After all, it
was somewhat of an undertaking for an unworldly woman to go out alone
into the world and buy a motor-car and engage a chauffeur, not to
mention clothing the chauffeur. But Mr. Prohack kept all his
imperturbability.
"Isn't it lovely?"
"Is it paid for?"
"Oh, no!"
"Didn't you have to pay any deposit?"
"Of course I didn't. I gave your name, and that was sufficient. We
needn't keep it if we don't like it after the trial run."
"And is it insured?"
"Of course, darling."
"And what about the licence?"
"Oh! The Eagle Company saw to all those stupid things for me."
"And how many times have you forged my signature while I've been lying
on a bed of pain?"
"The fact is, darling, I made the purchase in my own name. Now come
_along_. We're going round the park."
The way she patted his overcoat when she had got it on to him...! The
way she took him by the hand and pulled him towards the drawing-room
door...! She had done an exceedingly audacious deed, and her spirits
rose as she became convinced from his demeanour that she had not pushed
audacity too far. (For she was never absolutely sure of him.)
"Wait one moment," said Mr. Prohack releasing himself and slipping back
to the window.
"What's the matter?"
"I merely desired to look at the chauffeur's face. Is it a real
chauffeur? Not an automaton?"
"Arthur!"
"You're sure he's quite human?" Mrs. Prohack closed the piano, and then
stamped her foot.
"Listen," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm about to trust my life to the
mysterious being inside that uniform. Did you imagine that I would trust
my life to a perfect stranger? In another half hour he and I may be
lying in hospital side by side. And I don't even know his name! Fetch
him in, my dove, and allow me to establish relations with him. But
confide to me his name first." The expression on Mrs. Prohack's features
was one of sublime forbearance under ineffable provocation.
"This is Carthew," she announced, bringing the chauffeur into the
drawing-room.
Carthew was a fairly tall, fairly full-bodied, grizzled man of about
forty; he carried his cap and one gauntleted glove in one gloved hand,
and his long, stiff green overcoat slanted down from his neck to his
knees in an unbroken line. He had the impassivity of a policeman.
"Good morning, Carthew," Mr. Prohack began, rising. "I thought that you
and I would like to make one another's acquaintance."
"Yes, sir."
Mr. Prohack held out his hand, which Carthew calmly took.
"Will you sit down?"
"Thank you, sir."
"Have a cigarette?" Carthew hesitated.
"Do you mind if I have one of my own, sir?"
"These are Virginian."
"Oh! Thank you, sir." And Carthew took a cigarette from Mr. Prohack's
case.
"Light?"
"After you, sir."
"No, no."
"Thank you, sir."
Carthew coughed, puffed, and leaned back a little in his chair. At this
point Mrs. Prohack left the room. (She said afterwards that she left the
room because she couldn't have borne to be present when Carthew's back
broke the back of the chair.)
Carthew sat silent.
"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "What do you think of the car? I ought to tell
you I know nothing of motors myself, and this is the first one I've ever
had."
"The Eagle is a very good car, sir. If you ask me I should say it was
light on tyres and a bit thirsty with petrol. It's one of them cars as
anybody can _drive_--if you understand what I mean. I mean anybody can
make it _go_. But of course that's only the beginning of what I call
driving."
"Just so," agreed Mr. Prohack, drawing by his smile a very faint smile
from Carthew. "My son seems to think it's about the best car on the
market."
"Well, sir, I've been mixed up with cars pretty well all my life--I mean
since I was twenty--"
"Have you indeed!"
"I have, sir--" Carthew neatly flicked some ash on the carpet, and Mr.
Prohack thoughtfully did the same--"I have, sir, and I haven't yet come
across the best car on the market, if you understand what I mean."
"Perfectly," said Mr. Prohack.
Carthew sat silent.
"But it's a very good car. Nobody could wish for a better. I'll say
that," he added at length.
"Had many accidents in your time?"
"I've been touched, sir, but I've never touched anything myself. You can
have an accident while you're drawn up alongside the kerb. It rather
depends on how many fools have been let loose in the traffic, doesn't
it, sir, if you understand what I mean."
"Exactly," said Mr. Prohack.
Carthew sat silent.
"I gather you've been through the war," Mr. Prohack began again.
"I was in the first Territorial regiment that landed in France, and I
got my discharge July 1919."
"Wounded?"
"Well, sir, I've been blown up twice and buried once and pitched into
the sea once, but nothing ever happened to me."
"I see you don't wear any ribbons."
"It's like this, sir. I've seen enough ribbons on chests since the
armistice. It isn't as if I was one of them conscripts."
"No," murmured Mr. Prohack thoughtfully; then brightening: "And as soon
as you were discharged you went back to your old job?"
"I did and I didn't, sir. The fact is, I've been driving an ambulance
for the City of London, but as soon as I heard of something private I
chucked that. I can't say as I like these Corporations. There's a bit
too much stone wall about them Corporations, for my taste."
"Family man?" asked Mr. Prohack lightly. "I've two children myself and
both of them can drive."
"Really, sir, I am a family man, as ye might say, but my wife and me,
we're best apart."
"Sorry to hear that. I didn't want to--"
"Oh, not at all, sir! That's all right. But you see--the war--me being
away and all that--I've got the little boy. He's nine."
"Well," said Mr. Prohack, jumping up nervously, "suppose we go and have
a look at the car, shall we?"
"Certainly, sir," said Carthew, throwing the end of his cigarette into
the fender, and hastening.
"My dove," said Mr. Prohack to his wife in the hall. "I congratulate you
on your taste in chauffeurs. Carthew and I have laid the foundations of
a lasting friendship."
"I really wonder you asked him to smoke in the drawing-room," Mrs.
Prohack critically observed.
"Why? He saved England for me; and now I'm trusting my life to him."
"I do believe you'd _like_ there to be a revolution in this country."
"Not at all, angel! And I don't think there'll be one. But I'm taking my
precautions in case there should be one."
"He's only a chauffeur."
"That's very true. He was doing some useful work, driving an ambulance
to hospitals. But we've stopped that. He's now only a chauffeur to the
idle rich."
"Oh, Arthur! I wish you wouldn't try to be funny on such subjects. You
know you don't mean it."
Mrs. Prohack was now genuinely reproachful, and the first conjugal
joy-ride might have suffered from a certain constraint had it taken
place. It did not, however, take place. Just as Carthew was holding out
the rug (which Eve's prodigious thoroughness had remembered to buy)
preparatory to placing it on the knees of his employers, a truly
gigantic automobile drove up to the door, its long bonnet stopping
within six inches of the Eagle's tail-lantern. The Eagle looked like
nothing at all beside it. Mr. Prohack knew that leviathan. He had many
times seen it in front of the portals of his principal club. It was the
car of his great club crony, Sir Paul Spinner, the "city magnate."
Sir Paul, embossed with carbuncles, got out, and was presently being
presented to Eve,--for the friendship between Mr. Prohack and Sir Paul
had been a purely club friendship. Like many such friendships it had had
no existence beyond the club, and neither of the cronies knew anything
of real interest about the domestic circumstances of the other. Sir Paul
was very apologetic to Eve, but he imperiously desired an interview with
Mr. Prohack at once. Eve most agreeably and charmingly said that she
would take a little preliminary airing in the car by herself, and return
for her husband. Mr. Prohack would have preferred her to wait for him;
but, though Eve was sagacious enough at all normal times, when she got
an idea into her head that idea ruthlessly took precedence of everything
else in the external world. Moreover the car was her private creation,
and she was incapable of resisting its attractions one minute longer.
II
"I hear you've come into half a million, Arthur," said Paul Spinner,
after he had shown himself very friendly and optimistic about Mr.
Prohack's health and given the usual bulletin about his own carbuncles
and the shortcomings of the club.
"But you don't believe it, Paul."
"I don't," agreed Paul. "Things get about pretty fast in the City and we
can size them up fairly well; and I should say, putting two and two
together, that a hundred and fifty thousand would be nearer the mark."
"It certainly is," said Mr. Prohack.
If Paul Spinner had suggested fifty thousand, Mr. Prohack would have
corrected him, but being full of base instincts he had no impulse to
correct the larger estimate, which was just as inaccurate.
"Well, well! It's a most romantic story and I congratulate you on it.
No such luck ever happened to me." Sir Paul made this remark in a tone
to indicate that he had had practically no luck himself. And he really
believed that he had had no luck, though the fact was that he touched no
enterprise that failed. Every year he signed a huger cheque for
super-tax, and every year he signed it with a gesture signifying that he
was signing his own ruin.
This distressing illusion of Sir Paul's was probably due to his
carbuncles, which of all pathological phenomena are among the most
productive of a pessimistic philosophy. The carbuncles were well known
up and down Harley Street. They were always to be cured and they never
were cured. They must have cost their owner about as much as his
motor-car for upkeep--what with medical fees, travelling and foreign
hotels--and nobody knew whether they remained uncured because they were
incurable or because the medical profession thought it would be cruel at
one stroke to deprive itself of a regular income and Sir Paul of his
greatest hobby. The strange thing was that Sir Paul with all his
powerful general sagacity and shrewdness, continued firmly, despite
endless disappointments, in the mystical faith that one day the
carbuncles would be abolished.
"I won't beat about the bush," said he. "We know one another. I came
here to talk frankly and I'll talk frankly."
"You go right ahead," Mr. Prohack benevolently encouraged him.
"First of all I should like to give you just the least hint of warning
against that fellow Softly Bishop. I daresay you know something' about
him--"
"I know nothing about him, except the way he looks down his nose. But no
man who looks down his nose the way he looks down his nose is going to
influence me in the management of my financial affairs. I'm only an
official; I should be a lamb in the City; but I have my safeguards, old
chap. Thanks for the tip all the same."
Sir Paul Spinner laughed hoarsely, as Mr. Prohack had made him laugh
hundreds of times in the course of their friendship. And Mr. Prohack was
aware of a feeling of superiority to Sir Paul. The feeling grew steadily
in his breast, and he was not quite sure how it originated. Perhaps it
was due to a note of dawning obsequiousness in Sir Paul's laugh,
reminding Mr. Prohack of the ancient proverb that the jokes of the
exalted are always side-splitting.
"As I say," Sir Paul proceeded, "you and I know each other."
Mr. Prohack nodded, with a trace of impatience against unnecessary
repetition. Yet he was suddenly struck with the odd thought that Sir
Paul certainly did not know him, but only odd bits of him; and he was
doubtful whether he knew Sir Paul. He saw an obese man of sixty sitting
in the very chair that a few moments ago had been occupied by Carthew
the chauffeur, a man with big purplish features and a liverish eye, a
man smoking a plutocratic and heavenly cigar and eating it at the same
time, a man richly dressed and braided and jewelled, a man whose boots
showed no sign of a crease, an obvious millionaire of the old type, in
short a man who was practically all prejudices and waste-products. And
he wondered why and how that man had become his friend and won his
affection. Sir Paul looked positively coarse in Mr. Prohack's frail
Chippendale drawing-room, seeming to need for suitable environment the
pillared marble and gilt of the vast Club. Well, after having eaten many
hundreds of meals and drunk many hundreds of cups of coffee in the
grunting society of Sir Paul, all that Mr. Prohack could be sure of
knowing about Sir Paul was, first, that he had an absolutely unspotted
reputation; second, that he was a very decent, simple-minded, kindly,
ignorant fellow (ignorant, that is, in the matters that interested Mr.
Prohack); third, that he instinctively mistrusted intellect and
brilliance; fourth, that for nearly four years he had been convinced
that Germany would win the war, and fifth, that he was capable of
astounding freaks of generosity. Stay, there was another item,--Sir
Paul's invariable courtesy to the club servants, which courtesy he
somehow contrived to combine with continual grumbling. The club servants
held him in affection. It was probably this sixth item that outweighed
any of the others in Mr. Prohack's favourable estimate of the financier.
And then Mr. Prohack, as in a dream, heard from the lips of Paul Spinner
the words, "oil concessions in Roumania." In a flash, in an earthquake,
in a blinding vision, Mr. Prohack instantaneously understood the origin
of his queer nascent feeling of superiority to old Paul. What he had
previously known subconsciously he now knew consciously. Old Paul who
had no doubt been paying in annual taxes about ten times the amount of
Mr. Prohack's official annual salary; old Paul whose name was the
synonym for millions and the rumours of whose views on the stock-markets
caused the readers of financial papers to tremble; old Paul was after
Mr. Prohack's money! Marvellous, marvellous, thrice marvellous money!...
It was the most astounding, the most glorious thing that ever happened.
Mr. Prohack immediately began to have his misgivings about Sir Paul
Spinner. Simultaneously he felt sorry for old Paul. And such was his
constraint that he made the motion of swallowing, and had all he could
do not to blush.
Mr. Prohack might be a lamb in the City, but he had a highly trained
mind, and a very firm grasp of the mere technique of finance. Therefore
Sir Paul could explain himself succinctly and precisely in technical
terms, and he did so--with much skill and a sort of unconsidered
persuasiveness, realising in his rough commonsense that there was no
need to drive ideas into Mr. Prohack's head with a steam-hammer, or to
intoxicate him with a heady vapour of superlatives.
In a quarter of an hour Mr. Prohack learnt that Sir Paul was promoting a
strictly private syndicate as a preliminary to the formation of a big
company for the exploitation of certain options on Roumanian
oil-territory which Sir Paul held. He learnt about the reports of the
trial borings. He learnt about the character and the experience of the
expert whom Sir Paul had sent forth to Roumania. He learnt about the
world-supply of oil and the world-demand for oil. He learnt about the
great rival oil-groups that were then dividing the universe of oil. He
had the entire situation clearly mapped on his brain. Next he obtained
some startling inside knowledge about the shortage of liquid capital in
the circles of "big money," and then followed Sir Paul's famous club
disquisition upon the origin of the present unsaleableness of securities
and the appalling uneasiness, not to say collapse, of markets.
"What we want is stability, old boy. We want to be left alone. We're
being governed to death. Social reform is all right. I believe in it,
but everything depends on the pace. Change there ought to be, but it
mustn't be like a transformation scene in a pantomime."
And so on.
Mr. Prohack was familiar with it all. He expected the culminating part
of the exposition. But Sir Paul curved off towards the navy and the need
of conserving in British hands a more than adequate gush of oil for the
navy. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have left out the navy. And
then the Empire was reached. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have
left out the Empire. Finally Sir Paul arrived at the point.
"I've realised all I can in reason and I'm eighty thousand short. Of
course I can get it, get it easily, but not without giving away a good
part of my show in quarters that I should prefer to keep quite in the
dark. I thought of you--you're clean outside all that sort of thing, and
also I know you'd lie low. You might make a hundred per cent; you might
make two hundred per cent. But I'll guarantee you this--you won't lose,
whatever happens. Of course your capital may not be liquid. You mayn't
be able to get at it. I don't know. But I thought it was just worth
mentioning to you, and so I said to myself I'd look in here on my way to
the City."
Sir Paul Spinner touting for a miserable eighty thousand pounds!
"Hanged if I know _how_ my capital is!" said Mr. Prohack.
"I suppose your lawyer knows. Smathe, isn't it?... I heard so."
"How soon do you want an answer, yes or no?" Mr. Prohack asked, with a
feeling that he had his back to the wall and old Paul had a gun.
"I don't want an answer now, anyhow, old boy. You must think it over.
You see, once we've got the thing, I shall set the two big groups
bidding against each other for it, and we shall see some fun. And I
wouldn't ask them for cash payments. Only for payment in their own
shares--which are worth more than money."
"Want an answer to-morrow?"
"Could you make it to-night?" Sir Paul surprisingly answered. "And
assuming you say yes--I only say assuming--couldn't you run down with me
to Smathe's now and find out about your capital? That wouldn't bind you
in any way. I'm particularly anxious you should think it over very
carefully. And, by the way, better keep these papers to refer to. But if
you can't get at your capital, no use troubling further. That's the
first thing to find out."
"I can't go to Smathe's now," Mr. Prohack stammered.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm going out with my wife in the car."
"But, my dear old boy, it's a big thing, and it's urgent."
"Yes, I quite see that. But I've got to go with Marian. I'll tell you
what I can do. I'll telephone Smathe that you're coming down to see him
yourself, and he must tell you everything. That'll be best. Then I'll
let you know my decision later."
As they parted, Sir Paul said:
"We know each other, and you may take it from me it's all right. I'll
say no more. However, you think it over."
"Oh! I will!"
Old Paul touting for eighty thousand pounds! A wondrous world! A
stupefying world!
Mr. Prohack, who didn't know what to do with a hundred thousand pounds,
saw himself the possessor of a quarter of a million, and was illogically
thrilled by the prospect. But the risk! Supposing that honest Paul was
wrong for once, or suppose he was carried off in the night by a
carbuncle,--Mr. Prohack might find himself a pauper with a mere trifle
of twenty thousand pounds to his name.
As soon as he had telephoned he resumed his hat and coat and went out on
to the pavement to look for his car, chauffeur and wife. There was not a
sign of them.
* * * * *
III
Mr. Prohack was undeniably a very popular man. He had few doubts
concerning the financial soundness of old Paul's proposition; but he
hesitated, for reasons unconnected with finance or with domesticity,
about accepting it. And he conceived the idea (which none but a very
peculiar man would have conceived) of discussing the matter with some
enemy of old Paul's. Now old Paul had few enemies. Mr. Prohack, however,
could put his hand on one,--Mr. Francis Fieldfare--the editor of an
old-established and lucrative financial weekly, and familiar to readers
of that and other organs as "F.F." Mr. Fieldfare's offices were quite
close to Mr. Prohack's principal club, of which Mr. Fieldfare also was a
member, and Mr. Fieldfare had the habit of passing into the club about
noon and reading the papers for an hour, lunching early, and leaving the
club again just as the majority of the members were ordering their
after-lunch coffee. Mr. Fieldfare pursued this course because he had a
deep instinct for being in the minority. Mr. Prohack looked at his
watch. The resolution of every man is limited in quantity. Only in mad
people is resolution inexhaustible. Mr. Prohack had no more resolution
than becomes an average sane fellow, and his resolution to wait for his
wife had been seriously tried by the energetic refusal to go with
Spinner to see Smathe. It now suddenly gave out.
"Pooh!" said Mr. Prohack. "I've waited long enough for her. She'll now
have to wait a bit for me."
And off he went by taxi to his club. The visit, he reflected, would
serve the secondary purpose of an inconspicuous re-entry into club-life
after absence from it.
He thought:
"They may have had an accident with that car. One day she's certain to
have an accident anyhow,--she's so impulsive."
Of course Mr. Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he
ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around
at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed
out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F.
just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to
observe that F.F. had evidently heard neither of his illness nor of his
inheritance.
Mr. Fieldfare was a spare, middle-aged man, of apparently austere habit;
short, shabby; a beautiful, resigned face, burning eyes, and a soft
voice. He was weighed down, and had been weighed down for thirty years,
by a sense of the threatened immediate collapse of society--of all
societies, and by the solemn illusion that he more clearly than anybody
else understood the fearful trend of events.
Mr. Prohack had once, during the war, remarked on seeing F.F. glance at
the tape in the Club: "Look at F.F. afraid lest there may be some good
news." Nevertheless he liked F.F.
As editor of a financial weekly, F.F. naturally had to keep well under
control his world-sadness. High finance cannot prosper in an atmosphere
of world-sadness, and hates it. F.F. ought never to have become the
editor of a financial weekly; but he happened to be an expert
statistician, an honest man and a courageous man, and an expert in the
pathology of stock-markets, and on this score his proprietors excused
the slight traces of world-sadness occasionally to be found in the
paper. He might have left his post and obtained another; but to be
forced by fate to be editor of a financial weekly was F.F.'s chief
grievance in life, and he loved a good grievance beyond everything.
"But, my dear fellow," said F.F. with his melancholy ardent glance, when
Mr. Prohack had replied suitably to his opening question. "I'd no idea
you'd been unwell. I hope it isn't what's called a breakdown."
"Oh, no!" Mr. Prohack laughed nervously. "But you know what doctors are.
A little rest has been prescribed."
F.F. gazed at him softly compassionate, as if to indicate that nothing
but trouble could be expected under the present political regime. They
examined the tape together.
"Things can't go on much longer like this," observed F.F.
comprehensively, in front of the morning's messages from the capitals of
the world.
"Still," said Mr. Prohack, "we've won the war, haven't we?"
"I suppose we have," said F.F. and sighed.
Mr. Prohack felt that he had no more time for preliminaries, and in
order to cut them short started some ingenious but quite inexcusable
lying.
"You didn't chance to see old Paul Spinner going out as you came in?"
"No," answered F.F. "Why?"
"Nothing. Only a man in the morning-room was wanting to know if he was
still in the Club, and I told him I'd see."
"I hear," said F.F. after a moment, and in a lower voice, "I hear he's
getting up some big new oil scheme."
"Ah!" murmured Mr. Prohack, delighted at so favourable a coincidence,
with a wonderful imitation of casualness. "And what may that be?"
"Nobody knows. Some people would give a good deal to know. But if I'm
any judge of my Spinner they won't know till he's licked off all the
cream. It's marvellous to me how Spinner and his sort can keep on
devoting themselves to the old ambitions while the world's breaking up.
Marvellous!"
"Money, you mean?"
"Personal aggrandisement."
"Well," answered Mr. Prohack, with a judicial, detached air. "I've
always found Spinner a very decent agreeable chap."
"Oh, yes! Agreed! Agreed! They're all too confoundedly agreeable for
anything, all that lot are."
"But surely he's honest?"
"Quite. As straight a man as ever breathed, especially according to his
own lights. All his enterprises are absolutely what is known as 'sound.'
They all make rich people richer, and in particular they make _him_
richer, though I bet even he's been feeling the pinch lately. They all
have."
"Still, I expect old Spinner desires the welfare of the country just as
much as any one else. It's not all money with him."
"No. But did you ever know Spinner touch anything that didn't mean money
in the first place? I never did. What he and his lot mean by the welfare
of the country is the stability of the country _as it is_. They see the
necessity for development, improvement in the social scheme. Oh, yes!
They see it and admit it. Then they go to church, or they commune with
heaven on the golf-course, and their prayer is: 'Give us needed change,
O Lord, but not just yet.'"
The pair moved to the morning-room.
"Look here," said Mr. Prohack, lightly, ignoring the earnestness in
F.F.'s tone. "Supposing you had a bit of money, say eighty thousand
pounds, and the chance to put it into one of old who-is-it's schemes,
what would you do?"
"I should be ashamed to have eighty thousand pounds," F.F. replied with
dark whispering passion. "And in any case nothing would induce me to
have any dealings with the gang."
"Are they all bad?"
"They're all bad, all! They are all anti-social. All! They are all a
curse to the country and to all mankind." F.F. had already rung the
bell, and he now beckoned coldly to the waitress who entered the room.
"Everybody who supports the present Government is guilty of a crime
against human progress. Bring me a glass of that brown sherry I had
yesterday--you know the one--and three small pieces of cheese."
Mr. Prohack went away to the telephone, and got Paul Spinner at Smathe's
office.
"I only wanted to tell you that I've decided to come into your show, if
Smathe can arrange for the money. I've thought it all over carefully,
and I'm yours, old boy."
He hung up the receiver immediately.
* * * * *
IV
The excursion to the club had taken longer than Mr. Prohack had
anticipated, and when he got back home it was nearly lunch-time. No sign
of an Eagle car or any other car in front of the house! Mr. Prohack let
himself in. The sounds of a table being set came from the dining-room.
He opened the door there. Machin met him at the door. Each withdrew from
the other, avoiding a collision.
"Your mistress returned?"
"Yes, sir." Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.
"Where is she?"
"I was just coming to tell you, sir. She told me to say that she was
lying down."
"Oh!"
Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs. He
had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the
placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not
possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show.
She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete
confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all
her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he
was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and
that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity
were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his
sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom
in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of
the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely
resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite
unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of
a fellow and the smartest man in the world.
Further, she would draw in the horns of her secret schemes of
expenditure. She would say that she had intended to do so-and-so and to
buy so-and-so, but that perhaps it would be better, in view of the
uncertainties of destiny, neither to do nor to buy so-and-so. In short,
she would succeed in conveying to him the idea that to live with him was
like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. She loved to live with him, the compensations were exquisite,
and moreover what would be his fate if he were alone? Still, it was like
being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy
Atlantic. And she would cling closer to him and point to the red sun
setting among black clouds of tempest. And this would continue until he
could throw say about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds into her lap,
whereupon she would calmly assert that in her opinion he and she had
really been safe all the while on the glassy lake of the Serpentine in a
steamer.
"I ought to have thought of all that before," he said to himself. "And
if I had I should have bought houses, something for her to look at and
touch. And even then she would have suggested that if I hadn't been a
coward I could have done better than houses. She would have found in
_The Times_ every day instances of companies paying twenty and thirty
per cent ... No! It would have been impossible for me to invest the
money without losing her esteem for me as a man of business. I wish to
heaven I hadn't got any money. So here goes!"
And he burst with assumed confidence into the bedroom. And
simultaneously, to intensify his unease, the notion that profiteering
was profiteering, whether in war or in peace, and the notion that F.F.
was a man of lofty altruistic ideals, surged through his distracted
mind.
Eve was lying on the bed. She looked very small on the bed, smaller than
usual. At the sound of the door opening she said, without moving her
head--he could not see her face from the door:
"Is that you, Arthur?"
"Yes, what's the matter?"
"Just put my cloak over my feet, will you?"
He came forward and took the cloak off a chair.
"What's the matter?" he repeated, arranging the cloak.
"I'm not hurt, dearest, I assure you I'm not--not at all." She was
speaking in a faint, weak voice, like a little child's.
"Then you've had an accident?"
She glanced up at him sideways, timidly, compassionately, and nodded.
"You mustn't be upset. I told Machin to go on with her work and not to
say anything to you about it. I preferred to tell you myself. I know how
sensitive you are where I'm concerned."
Mr. Prohack had to adjust his thoughts, somewhat violently, to the new
situation, and he made no reply; but he was very angry about the mere
existence of motor-cars. He felt that he had always had a prejudice
against motor-cars, and that the prejudice was not a prejudice because
it was well-founded.
"Darling, don't look so stern. It wasn't Carthew's fault. Another car
ran into us. I told Carthew to drive in the Park, and we went right
round the Park in about five minutes. So as I felt sure you'd be a long
time with that fat man, I had the idea of running down to Putney--to see
Sissie." Eve laughed nervously. "I thought I might possibly bring her
home with me.... After the accident Carthew put me into a taxi and I
came back. Of course he had to stay to look after the car. And then you
weren't here when I arrived! Where are you going, dearest?"
"I'm going to telephone for the doctor, of course," said Mr. Prohack
quietly, but very irritably.
"Oh, darling! I've sent for the doctor. He wasn't in, they said, but
they said he'd be back quite soon and then he'd come at once. I don't
really need the doctor. I only sent for him because I knew you'd be so
frightfully angry if I didn't."
Mr. Prohack had returned to the bed. He took his wife's hand.
"Feel my pulse. It's all right, isn't it?"
"I can't feel it at all."
"Oh, Arthur, you never could! I can feel your hand trembling, that's
what I can feel. Now please don't be upset, Arthur."
"I suppose the car's smashed?"
She nodded:
"It's a bit broken."
"Where was it?"
"It was just on the other side of Putney Bridge, on the tramlines
there."
"Carthew wasn't hurt?"
"Oh, no! Carthew was simply splendid."
"How did it happen, exactly?"
"Oh, Arthur, you with your 'exactlys'! Don't ask me. I'm too tired.
Besides, I didn't see it. My eyes were shut." She closed her eyes.
Suddenly she sat up and put her hand on his shoulder, in a sort of
appeal, vaguely smiling. He tried to smile, but could not. Then her hand
dropped. A totally bewildered expression veiled the anxious kindness in
her eyes. The blood left her face until her cheeks were nearly as white
as the embroidered cloth on the night-table. Her eyes closed. She fell
back. She had fainted. She was just as if dead. Her hand was as cold as
the hand of a corpse.
Such was Mr. Prohack's vast experience of life that he had not the least
idea what to do in this crisis. But he tremendously regretted that
Angmering, Bishop, and the inventor of the motor-car had ever been born.
He rushed out on to the landing and loudly shouted: "Machin! Machin!
Ring up that d----d doctor again, and if he can't come ring up Dr. Plott
at once."
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir."
He rushed back into the bedroom, discovered Eve's smelling-salts, and
held them to her nose. Already the blood was mounting again.
"Well, she's not dead, anyway!" he said to himself grimly.
He could see the blood gently mounting, mounting. It was a wonderful, a
mysterious and a reassuring sight.
"I don't care so long as she isn't injured internally," he said to
himself.
Eve opened her eyes in a dazed look. Then she grinned as if
apologetically. Then she cried copiously.
Mr. Prohack heard a car outside. It was Dr. Veiga's. The mere sound of
Dr. Veiga's car soothed Mr. Prohack, accused him of losing his head, and
made a man of him.
Dr. Veiga entered the bedroom in exactly the same style as on his first
visit to Mr. Prohack himself. He had heard the nature of the case from
Machin on his way upstairs. He listened to Mr. Prohack, who spoke, in
the most deceitful way, as if he had been through scores of such
affairs.
"Exactly," said Dr. Veiga, examining Eve summarily. "She sat up. The
blood naturally left her head, and she fainted. Fainting is nothing but
a withdrawing of blood from the head. Will you ring for that servant of
yours, please?"
"I'm positive I'm quite all right, Doctor," Eve murmured.
"Will you kindly not talk," said he. "If you're so positive you're all
right, why did you send for me? Did you walk upstairs? Then your legs
aren't broken, at least not seriously." He laughed softly.
But shortly afterwards, when Mr. Prohack, admirably dissembling his
purposes, crept with dignity out of the room, Dr. Veiga followed him,
and shut the door, leaving Machin busy within.
"I don't think that there is any internal lesion," said Dr. Veiga, with
seriousness. "But I will not yet state absolutely. She has had a very
severe shock and her nerves are considerably jarred."
"But it's nothing physical?"
"My dear sir, of course it's physical. Do you conceive the nerves are
not purely physical organs? I can't conceive them as anything but
physical organs. Can you?"
Mr. Prohack felt schoolboyish.
"It's you that she's upset about, though. Did you notice she motioned me
to give you some of the brandy she was taking? Very sweet of her, was it
not?... What are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to fetch my daughter."
"Excellent. But have something before you go. You may not know it, but
you have been using up nervous tissue, which has to be replaced."
As he was driving down to Putney in a taxi, Mr. Prohack certainly did
feel very tired. But he was not so tired as not to insist on helping the
engine of the taxi. He pushed the taxi forward with all his might all
the way to Putney. He pushed it till his arms ached, though his hands
were in his pockets. The distance to Putney had incomprehensibly
stretched to nine hundred and ninety-nine miles.
He found Sissie in the studio giving a private lesson to a middle-aged
gentleman who ought, Mr. Prohack considered, to have been thinking of
his latter end rather than of dancing. He broke up the lesson very
abruptly.
"Your mother has had a motor accident. You must come at once."
Sissie came.
"Then it must have been about here," said she, as the taxi approached
Putney Bridge on the return journey.
So it must. He certainly had not thought of the _locus_ of the accident.
He had merely pictured it, in his own mind, according to his own
frightened fancy. Yes, it must have been just about there. And yet there
was no sign of it in the roadway. Carthew must have had the wounded
Eagle removed. Mr. Prohack sat stern and silent. A wondrous woman, his
wife! Absurd, possibly, about such matters as investments; but an
angel! Her self-forgetfulness, her absorption in _him_,--staggering! The
accident was but one more proof of it. He was greatly alarmed about her,
for the doctor had answered for nothing. He seemed to have a thousand
worries. He had been worried all his life, but the worries that had
formed themselves in a trail to the inheritance were worse worries than
the old simple ones. No longer did the thought of the inheritance
brighten his mind. He somehow desired to go back to former days.
Glancing askance at Sissie, he saw that she too was stern. He resumed
the hard pushing of the taxi. It was not quite so hard as before,
because he knew that Sissie also was pushing her full share.