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 makehimricher, 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 countryas 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.
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 inThe Timesevery 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 thelocusof 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 inhim,—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.
Within the next seven days Mr. Prohack had reason to lose confidence in himself as an expert in human nature. "After all," he reflected, "I must have been a very simple-minded man to have thought that I thoroughly understood another human being. Every human being is infinite, and will beat your understanding in the end."
The reference of course was to his wife. Since the automobile accident she had become another person and a more complex person. The climax, or what seemed to be the climax, came one cold morning when she and Mr. Prohack and Sissie and Dr. Veiga were sitting together in the little boudoir beyond the bedroom. They were packed in there because Eve (otherwise Marian) had taken a fancy to the sofa.
Eve was relating to the admired and trusted doctor all her peculiar mental and moral symptoms. She was saying that she could no longer manage the house, could not concentrate her mind on anything, could not refrain from strange caprices, could not remain calm, could not keep her temper, and was the worst conceivable wife for such a paragon as Arthur Prohack. Her daughter alone had saved the household organism from a catastrophe; her daughter Sissie—
"Come here, Sissie!"
Sissie obeyed the call and was suddenly embraced by her mother with deep tenderness. This in front of the doctor! Still more curious was the fact that Sissie, of late her mother's frigid critic, came forward and responded to the embrace almost effusively. The spectacle was really touching. It touched Mr. Prohack, who yet felt as if the floor had yielded under his feet and he was falling into the Tube railway underground. Indeed Mr. Prohack had never had such sensations as drew and quartered him then.
"Well," said Dr. Veiga to Mrs. Prohack in his philosophical-realistic manner, "I've been marking time for a week. I shall now proceed to put you right. You can't sleep. You will sleep to-night—I shall send you something. I suppose it isn't your fault that you've been taking the digestive tonic I sent you last thing at night under the impression that it was a sedative, in spite of the label. But it is regrettable. As for your headaches, I will provide a pleasing potion. As for this sad lack of application, don't attempt application. As for your strange caprices, indulge them. One thing is essential. You must go away to the sea. You must go to Frinton-on-Sea. It is an easy journey. There is a Pullman car on the morning train, and the air is unrivalled for your—shall I say?—idiosyncrasy."
"Yes, darling mother," said Sissie. "You must go away, and father and I will take you."
"Of course!" confirmed Mr. Prohack, with an imitation of pettishness, as though he had been steadily advocating a change of scene for days past; but he had done nothing of the kind.
"Oh!" Eve cried piteously, "that's the one thing I can't do!"
Dr. Veiga laughed. "Afraid of the expense, I suppose?"
"No," Eve answered with seriousness. "My husband has just made a very fortunate investment, which means a profit of at least a hundred thousand pounds—like that!" She snapped her fingers and laughed lightly.
Here was another point to puzzle an expert in human nature. Instead of being extremely incredulous and apprehensive about the vast speculation with Sir Paul, Eve had in truth accepted it for a gold-mine. She did not assume satisfaction; she really was satisfied. Her satisfaction was absurd, and nothing that Mr. Prohack could say would diminish it. She had already begun to spend the financial results of the speculation with enormous verve. For instance, she had hired another Eagle to take the place of the wounded Eagle, without uttering a word to her husband of what she had done. Mr. Prohack could see the dregs of his bank-balance; and in a dream he had had glimpses of a sinister edifice at the bottom of a steep slope, the building being the Bankruptcy Court.
"Is it a railway strike you're afraid of?" demanded Dr. Veiga cruelly.
And Eve replied with sweetness:
"I can't leave London until my son Charlie comes back from Glasgow, and he's written me to say he'll be here next week."
A first-rate example, this, of her new secretiveness! She had said absolutely nothing to Mr. Prohack about a letter from Charlie.
"When did you hear that?" Mr. Prohack might well have asked; but he was too loyal to her to betray her secretiveness by such a question. He did not wish the Portuguese quack to know that he, the husband, was kept in the dark about anything whatever. He had his ridiculous dignity, had Mr. Prohack, and all his motives were mixed motives. Not a perfectly pure motive in the whole of his volitional existence!
However, Sissie put the question in her young blundering way. "Oh, mother dear! You never told us!"
"I received the letter the day before yesterday," Eve continued gravely. "And Charlie is certainly not coming home to find me away."
For two entire days she had had the important letter and had concealed it. Mr. Prohack was disturbed.
"Very well," Dr. Veiga concurred. "It doesn't really matter whether you go to Frinton now or next month, or even next year but one. You're a powerful woman and you'll last a long time yet, especially if you don't worry. I won't call for about a week, and if you'd like to consult another doctor, do." He smiled on her in an avuncular manner, and rose.
Whereupon Mr. Prohack also jumped up.
"I'm not worrying," she protested, with a sweet, pathetic answering smile. "Yes, I am. Yes, I am. I'm worrying because I know I'm worrying my poor husband." She went quickly to her poor husband and kissed him lavishly. Eve was an artist in kissing, and never a greater artist than at that moment. And now Mr. Prohack, though still to the physical eye a single individual, became two Mr. Prohacks. There was the Mr. Prohack who strongly deprecated this departure from the emotional reserve which is one of the leading and sublimest characteristics of the British governing-class. And there was the Mr. Prohack, all nerves and heart and humanity, who profoundly enjoyed the demonstration of a woman's affection, disordered and against the rules though the demonstration might be. The first Mr. Prohack blushed and hated himself for blushing. The second was quite simply enraptured and didn't care who knew it.
"Dr. Veiga," Eve appealed, clinging to Mr. Prohack's coat. "It is my husband who needs looking after. He is not making any progress, and it is my fault. And let me tell you that you've been neglecting him for me."
She was a dramatic figure of altruism, of the everlasting sacrificial feminine. She was quite possibly absurd, but beyond doubt she was magnificent. Mr. Prohack felt ashamed of himself, and the more ashamed because he considered that he was in quite tolerable health.
"Mother," murmured Sissie, with a sweetness of which Mr. Prohack had imagined her to be utterly incapable. "Come and sit down."
And Eve, guided by her daughter, the callous, home-deserting dancing-mistress, came and sat down.
"My dear sir," said Dr. Veiga. "There is nothing at all to cause alarm. She will gradually recover. Believe me."
He and Mr. Prohack and Sissie were conspiring together in the dining-room, the drawing-room being at that hour and on that day under the dominion of servants with brushes.
"But what's the matter with her? What is it?"
"Merely neurasthenia—traumatic neurasthenia."
"But what's that?" Mr. Prohack spoke low, just as though his wife could overhear from the boudoir above and was listening to them under the impression that they were plotting against her life.
"It's a morbid condition due to a violent shock."
"But how? You told me the other day that it was purely physical."
"Well," said Dr. Veiga. "It is, because it must be. But I assure you that if a post-mortem were to be held on Mrs. Prohack—"
"Oh, doctor, please!" Sissie stopped him resentfully.
The doctor paused and then continued: "There would be no trace of any morbid condition in any of the organs."
"Then how do you explain it?"
"We don't explain it," cried Dr. Veiga, suddenly throwing the onus on the whole medical profession. "We can't. We don't know."
"It's very, very unsatisfactory, all this ignorance."
"It certainly is. But did you suppose that medical science, alone among all sciences, had achieved finality and omniscience? We've reached the state of knowing that we don't know, and that's something. I hope I'm not flattering you by talking like this. I only do it to people whom I suspect to be intelligent. But of course if you'd prefer the omniscient bedside manner you can have it without extra charge."
Mr. Prohack thought, frightened: "I shall be making a friend of this quack soon, if I'm not careful."
"And by the way, aboutyourhealth," Dr. Veiga proceeded, after having given further assurances as to his other patient. "Mrs. Prohack was perfectly correct. You're not making progress. The fact is, you're bored. You haven't organised your existence, and the lack of organisation is reacting on your health."
"Something is reacting on his health," Sissie put in. "I'm not at all pleased." She was now not Mr. Prohack's daughter but his aunt.
"How can I organise my existence?" Mr. Prohack burst out crossly. "I haven't got any existence to organise. I haven't got anything to do. I thought I had too much to do, the other day. Illusion. Of course I'm bored. I feel all right, but bored I am. And it's your fault."
"It is," the doctor admitted. "It is my fault. I took you for a person of commonsense, and so I didn't tell you that two and two make four and a lot more important things of the same sort. I ought to have told you. You've taken on the new profession of being idle—it's essential for you—but you aren't treating it seriously. You have to be aprofessionallyidle man. Which means that you haven't got a moment to spare. When I advised you to try idleness, I didn't mean you to be idle idly. That's worse than useless. You've got to be idle busily. You aren't doing half enough. Do you ever have a Turkish bath?"
"No. Never could bear the idea of them."
"Well, you will kindly take two Turkish baths a week. You can be massaged at the same time. A Turkish bath is as good as a day's hunting, as far as exercise goes, but you must have more exercise. Do you dance? I see you don't. You had better begin dancing. There is no finer exercise. I absolutely prescribe it."
At this juncture Mr. Prohack was rather relieved that the sound of an unaccustomed voice in the hall drew his daughter out of the dining-room. When she had gone Dr. Veiga went on, in a more confidential tone:
"There's another point. An idle man who really knows his business will visit his tailor's, his hosier's, his bootmaker's, his barber's much oftener and much more conscientiously than you do. You've got a mind above clothes—of course. So have I. I take a wicked pleasure in being picturesquely untidy. But I'm not a patient. My life is a great lark. Yours isn't. Yours is serious. You have now a serious profession, idleness. Bring your mind down to clothes. I say this, partly because to be consistently well-dressed means much daily expenditure of time, and partly because really good clothes have a distinctly curative effect on the patient who wears them. Then again—"
Mr. Prohack was conscious of a sudden joyous uplifting of the spirit.
"Here!" said he, interrupting Dr. Veiga with a grand gesture. "Have a cigar."
"I cannot, my friend." Dr. Veiga looked at his watch.
"You must. Have a corona." Mr. Prohack moved to the cigar cabinet which he had recently purchased.
"No. My next patient is awaiting me in Hyde Park Gardens at this moment."
"Let him die!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack ruthlessly. "You've got to have a cigar with me. Look. I'll compromise. I'll make it a half-corona. You can charge me as if for another consultation."
The doctor's foreign eyes twinkled as he sat down and struck a match.
"You thought I was a quack," he said maliciously, and maliciously he seemed to intensify his foreign accent.
"I did," admitted Mr. Prohack with candour.
"So I am," said Dr. Veiga. "But I'm a fully qualified quack, and all really good doctors are quacks. They have to be. They wouldn't be worth anything if they weren't. Medicine owes a great deal to quacks."
"Tell me something about some of your cases," said Mr. Prohack imperatively. "You're one of the most interesting men I've ever met. So now you know. We want some of your blood transfused, into the English character. You've got a soul above medicine as well as clothes."
"All good doctors have," said Dr. Veiga. "My life is a romance."
"And so shall mine be," said Mr. Prohack.
When at length Mr. Prohack escorted Dr. Veiga out into the hall he saw Sissie kissing Eliza Brating with much affection on the front-door step. They made an elegant group for a moment and then Eliza Brating departed hurriedly, disappearing across the street behind Dr. Veiga's attendant car.
"Now I'll just repeat once more to both of you," resumed Dr. Veiga, embracing father and daughter in one shrewd glance. "You've nothing to worry about upstairs." He indicated the boudoir by a movement of his somewhat tousled head. "But you've got just a little to worry about here." And he indicated Mr. Prohack.
"I know," said Sissie with assurance. "But I shall look after him, doctor. You can rely on me. I understand—both cases."
"Well, there's one good thing," said Sissie, following her father into the dining-room after the doctor had gone. "I've done with that foolish Eliza. I knew it couldn't last and it hasn't. Unless I'm there all the time to keep my eye on everything—of course it all goes to pieces. That girl is the biggest noodle...!"
"But haven't I just seen you and her joined in the deepest affection?"
"Naturally I had to kiss her. But I've finished with her. And what's more, she knows what I think of her. She never liked me."
"Sissie," said Mr. Prohack, "you shock me." And indeed he was genuinely shocked, for he had always thought that Sissie was different from other girls; that she had all the feminine qualities without any of the feminine defects. Yes, he had thought that she might develop into a creature more perfect even than Marian. And here she was talking and behaving exactly as men at the club would relate of their own conventional women.
Sissie gazed firmly at her father, as it were half in pity and half in disdain. Did the innocent fellow not then understand the nature of women? Or was he too sentimental to admit it, too romantic to be a realist?
"Would you believe," said Sissie, "that although I was there last night and told her exactly what to do, she's had a quarrel this morning with the landlord of the studio? Well, she has. You know the A.R.A. on the first floor has been making a lot of silly complaints about the noise—music and so on—every night. And some other people have complained.Icould have talked the landlord round in ten minutes! Eliza doesn't merely not talk him round,—she quarrels with him! Of course it's all up. And as if that wasn't enough, a County Council inspector has been round asking about a music and dancing licence. We shall either have to give up business altogether or else move somewhere else. Eliza says she knows of another studio. Well, I shall write her to-night and tell her she can have my share of the fittings and furniture and go where she likes, but I shan't go with her. And if she never liked me I can honestly say I never liked her. And I don't want to run a dancing studio any more, either. Why should I, after all? Wewerethe new poor. Now we're the new rich. Well, we may as wellbethe new rich."
Mr. Prohack was now still more shocked. Nay, he was almost frightened. And yet he wasn't either shocked or frightened, in the centre of his soul. He was rather triumphant,—not about his daughter with the feet of clay, but about himself.
"But I shan't give up teaching dancing entirely," said Sissie.
"No?" He wondered what would come next.
"No! I shall teach you."
"Indeed you won't!" He instinctively recoiled.
"Yes, I shall. I promised the doctor he could rely on me. You'll buy a gramophone, and we'll have the carpet up in the drawing-room. Oh! You startled deer, do you want to run back into the depths of the forest?... Father, you are the funniest father that ever was." She marched to him and put her hand on his shoulder and just twitched his beard. "I can look after you quite as well as mother can. We're pals, aren't we?"
"Yes. Like the tiger and the lamb. You've got hold of my silky fleece already."
Mr. Prohack sat in the dining-room alone. The room was now heated by an electric radiator which Eve had just bought for the sake of economy. But her economy was the economy of the rich, for the amount of expensive current consumed by that radiator was prodigious, while the saving it effected in labour, cleanliness and atmospheric purity could certainly not have been measured without a scientific instrument adapted to the infinitely little. (Still, Machin admired and loved it.) Mr. Prohack perceived that all four bars of it were brightly incandescent, whereas three bars would have been ample to keep the room warm. He ought to get up and turn a bar off.... He had a hundred preoccupations. His daughter had classed him with the new rich. He resented the description, but could he honestly reject it? All his recent troubles sprang from the new riches. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would assuredly have been at his office in the Treasury, earning an honest living, at that very moment. For only sick persons of plenteous independent means are ever prescribed for as he had been prescribed for; the others either go on working and making the best of such health as is left to them, or they die. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not have had a car and the car would not have had an accident and he would not have been faced with the prospect (as he was faced with it) of a legal dispute, to be fought by him on behalf of the insurance company, with the owner of the colliding car. (The owner of the colliding car was a young woman as to whose veracity Carthew had had some exceedingly hard things to say.) Mr. Prohack would have settled the matter, but neither Eve nor the insurance company would let him settle it. And if the car had not had an accident Eve would not have had traumatic neurasthenia, with all its disconcerting reactions on family life. And if he had not inherited from a profiteer, Charlie would not have gone off to Glasgow,—he had heard odds and ends of strange tales as to Charlie's doings in Glasgow,—not in the least reassuring! And if he had not inherited from a profiteer Sissie would not have taken a share in a dancing studio and might never have dangerously danced with that worm Oswald Morfey. And if he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not have been speculating, with a rich chance of more profiteering, in Roumanian oil with Paul Spinner. In brief—well, he ought to get up and turn off a bar of that wasteful radiator.
Yet he was uplifted, happy. Not because of his wealthy ease. No! A week or two ago he had only to think of his fortune to feel uplifted and happy. But now!
No! He was uplifted and happy now for the simple reason that he had caught the romance of the doctor's idea of taking idleness seriously and practising it as a profession. If circumstances forced him to be idle, he would be idle in the grand manner. He would do everything that the doctor had suggested, and more. (The doctor saw life like a poet. He might be a cross between a comedian and a mountebank, but he was a great fellow.) Every species of idleness should have its appointed hour. In the pursuit of idleness he would become the busiest man in London. A definite programme would be necessary. Strict routine would be necessary. No more loafing about! He hankered after routine as the drunkard after alcohol. Routine was what he had been missing. The absence of routine, and naught else, was retarding his recovery. (Yes, he knew in his heart that what they all said was true,—he was not getting better.) His own daughter had taught him wisdom. Inevitably, unavoidably, he was the new rich. Well, he would be the new rich thoroughly. No other aim was logical.... Let the radiator burn!
Three days later Mr. Prohack came home late with his daughter in the substituted car. He had accompanied Sissie to Putney for the final disposition of the affairs of the dance-studio, and had witnessed her blighting politeness to Eliza Brating and Eliza Brating's blighting politeness to her. The last kiss between these two young women would have desolated the heart of any man whose faith in human nature was less strong than Mr. Prohack's. "I trust that the excellent Eliza is not disfigured for life," he had observed calmly in the automobile. "What are you talking about, father?" Sissie had exclaimed, suspicious. "I was afraid her lips might be scorched. You feel no pain yourself, my child, I hope?" He made the sound of a kiss. After this there was no more conversation in the car during the journey. Arrived home, Sissie said nonchalantly that she was going to bed.
"Burn my lips first," Mr. Prohack implored.
"Father!" said she, having kissed him. "You are simply terrible."
"I am a child," he replied. "And you are my grandmother."
"You wait till I give you your next dancing-lesson," Sissie retorted, turning and threatening him from the stairs. "It won't be as mild as this afternoon's."
He smiled, giving an imitation of the sphinx. He was happy enough as mortals go. His wife was perhaps a little better. And he was gradually launching himself into an industrious career of idleness. Also, he had broken the ice,—the ice, that is to say, of tuition in dancing. Not a word had been spoken abroad in the house about the first dancing-lesson. He had had it while Mrs. Prohack was, in theory at least, paying calls; at any rate she had set forth in the car. Mr. Prohack and Sissie had rolled up the drawing-room carpet and moved the furniture themselves. Mr. Prohack had unpacked the gramophone in person. They had locked the drawing-room door. At the end of the lesson they had relaid the carpet and replaced the furniture and enclosed the gramophone and unlocked the door, and Mr. Prohack had issued from the drawing-room like a criminal. The thought in his mind had been that he was no end of a dog and of a brave dog at that. Then he sneered at himself for thinking such a foolish thought. After all, what was there in learning to dance? But the sneer was misplaced. His original notion that he had done something courageous and wonderful was just a notion.
The lesson had favoured the new nascent intimacy with his daughter. Evidently she was a born teacher as well as a born dancer. He perceived in two minutes how marvellous her feet were. She guided him with pressures light as a feather. She allowed herself to be guided with an intuitive responsiveness that had to be felt to be believed. Her exhortations were delicious, her reprimands exquisite, her patience was infinite. Further, she said that he had what she called "natural rhythm," and would learn easily and satisfactorily. Best of all, he had been immediately aware of the physical benefit of the exercise. The household was supposed to know naught of the affair, but the kitchen knew a good deal about it somehow; the kitchen was pleasantly and rather condescendingly excited, and a little censorious, for the reason that nobody in the kitchen had ever before lived in a house the master of which being a parent of adult children took surreptitious lessons in dancing; the thing was unprecedented, and therefore of course intrinsically reprehensible. Mr. Prohack guessed the attitude of the kitchen, and had met Machin's respectful glance with a self-conscious eye.
He now bolted the front-door and went upstairs extinguishing the lights after him. Eve had told her husband and child that she should go to bed early. He meant to have a frolicsome, teasing chat with her, for the doctor had laid it down that light conversation would assist the cure of traumatic neurasthenia. She would not be asleep, and even if she were asleep she would be glad to awaken, because she admired his style of gossip when both of them were in the vein for it. He would describe for her the evening at the studio humorously, in such a fashion as to confirm her in her righteous belief that the misguided Sissie had seen the maternal wisdom and quitted dance-studios for ever.
The lamps were out in the bedroom. She slept. He switched on a light, but her bed was empty; it had not been occupied!
"Marian!" he called in a low voice, thinking that she might be in the boudoir.
And if she was in the boudoir she must be reclining in the dark there. He ascertained that she was not in the boudoir. Then he visited both the drawing-room and the dining-room. No Marian anywhere! He stood a moment in the hall and was in a mind to ring for Machin—he could see from a vague illumination at the entrance to the basement steps that the kitchen was still inhabited—but just then all the servants came upwards on the way to the attics, and at the strange spectacle of their dancing master in the hall they all grew constrained and either coughed or hurried as though they ought not to be caught in the act of retiring to bed.
Mr. Prohack, as it were, threw a lasso over Machin, who was the last of the procession.
"Where is your mistress, Machin?" He tried to be matter-of-fact, but something unusual in his tone apparently started her.
"She's gone to bed, sir. She told me to put her hot-water bag in the bed early."
"Oh! Thanks! Good-night."
"Good-night, sir."
He could not persuade himself to call an alarm. He could not even inform Machin that she was mistaken, for to do so would have been equivalent to calling an alarm. Hesitating and inactive he allowed the black-and-white damsels and the blue cook to disappear. Nor would he disturb Sissie—yet. He had first to get used to the singular idea that his wife had vanished from home. Could this vanishing be one of the effects of traumatic neurasthenia? He hurried about and searched all the rooms again, looking with absurd carefulness, as if his wife were an insignificant object that might have dropped unperceived under a chair or behind a couch.
Then he telephoned to her sister, enquiring in a voice of studied casualness. Eve was not at her sister's. He had known all the while that she would not be at her sister's. Being unable to recall the number, he had had to consult the telephone book. His instinct now was to fetch Sissie, whose commonsense had of late impressed him more and more; but he repressed the instinct, holding that he ought to be able to manage the affair alone. He could scarcely say to his daughter: "Your mother has vanished. What am I to do?" Moreover, feeling himself to be the guardian of Marian's reputation for perfect sanity, he desired not to divulge her disappearance, unless obliged to do so. She might return at any moment. She must return very soon. It was inconceivable that anything should have "happened" in the Prohack family....
Almost against his will he looked up "Police Stations" in the telephone-book. There were scores of police stations. The nearest seemed to be that of Mayfair. He demanded the number. To demand the number of the police station was like jumping into bottomless cold water. In a detestable dream he gave his name and address and asked if the police had any news of a street accident. Yes, several. He described his wife. He said, reflecting wildly, that she was not very tall and rather plump; dark hair. Dress? Dark blue. Hat and mantle? He could not say. Age? A queer impulse here. He knew that she hated the mention of her real age, and so he said thirty-nine. No! The police had no news of such a person. But the polite firm voice on the wire said that it would telephone to other stations and would let Mr. Prohack hear immediately if there was anything to communicate. Wonderful organisation, the London police force!
As he hung up the receiver he realised what had occurred and what he had done. Marian had mysteriously disappeared and he had informed the police,—he, Arthur Prohack, C.B. What an awful event!
His mind ran on the consequences of traumatic neurasthenia. He put on his hat and overcoat and unbolted the front-door as silently as he could—for he still did not want anybody in the house to know the secret—and went out into the street. What to do? A ridiculous move! Did he expect to find her lying in the gutter? He walked to the end of the dark street and peered into the cross-street, and returned. He had left the front-door open. As he re-entered the house he descried in a corner of the hall, a screwed-up telegraph-envelope. Why had he not noticed it before? He snatched at it. It was addressed to "Mrs. Prohack."
Mr. Prohack's soul was instantaneously bathed in heavenly solace. Traumatic neurasthenia had nothing to do with Eve's disappearance! His bliss was intensified by the fact that he had said not a word to the servants and had not called Sissie. And it was somewhat impaired by the other fact that he had been ass enough to tell the police. He was just puzzling his head to think what misfortune could have called his wife away—not that the prospect of any misfortune much troubled him now that Eve's vanishing was explained—when through the doorway he saw a taxi drive up. Eve emerged from the taxi.