Mr. Prohack by Arnold Bennett (best ebook reader .TXT) 📖

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