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

/>
II


"Lend me some money, will you?" murmured Mr. Prohack lightly to his splendid son, after he had glanced at the bill for Eve's theatre dinner at the Grand Babylon. Mr. Prohack had indeed brought some money with him, but not enough. "Haven't got any," said Charlie, with equal lightness. "Better give me the bill. I'll see to it." Whereupon Charlie signed the bill, and handed the bowing waiter five ten shilling notes.

"That's not enough," said Mr. Prohack.

"Not enough for the tip. Well, it'll have to be. I never give more than ten per cent."

Mr. Prohack strove to conceal his own painful lack of worldliness. He had imagined that he had in his pockets heaps of money to pay for a meal for a handful of people. He was mistaken; that was all, and the incident had no importance, for a few pounds more or less could not matter in the least to a gentleman of his income. Yet he felt guilty of being a waster. He could not accustom himself to the scale of expenditure. Barely in the old days could he have earned in a week the price of the repast consumed now in an hour. The vast apartment was packed with people living at just that rate of expenditure and seeming to think naught of it. "But do two wrongs make a right?" he privately demanded of his soul. Then his soul came to the rescue with its robust commonsense and replied:

"Perhaps two wrongs don't make a right, but five hundred wrongs positively must make a right." And he felt better.

And suddenly he understood the true function of the magnificent orchestra that dominated the scene. It was the function of a brass band at a quack-dentist's booth in a fair,--to drown the cries of the victims of the art of extraction.

"Yes," he reflected, full of health and carelessness. "This is a truly great life."

The party went off in two automobiles, his own and Lady Massulam's. Cars were fighting for room in front of the blazing facade of the Metropolitan Theatre, across which rose in fire the title of the entertainment, _Smack Your Face_, together with the names of Asprey Chown and Eliza Fiddle. Car after car poured out a contingent of glorious girls and men and was hustled off with ferocity by a row of gigantic and implacable commissionaires. Mr. Oswald Morfey walked straight into the building at the head of his guests. Highly expensive persons were humbling themselves at the little window of the box office, but Ozzie held his course, and officials performed obeisances which stopped short only at falling flat on their faces at the sight of him. Tickets were not for him.

"This is a beautiful box," said Eve to him, amazed at the grandeur of the receptacle into which they had been ushered.

"It's Mr. Chown's own box."

"Then isn't Mr. Chown to be here to-night?"

"No! He went to Paris this morning for a rest. The acting manager will telephone to him after each act. That's how he always does, you know."

"When the cat's away the mice will play," thought Mr. Prohack uncomfortably, with the naughty sensations of a mouse. The huge auditorium was a marvellous scene of excited brilliance. As the stalls filled up a burst of clapping came at intervals from the unseen pit.

"What are they clapping for?" said the simple Eve, who, like Mr. Prohack, had never been to a first-night before, to say nothing of such a super-first-night as this.

"Oh!" replied Ozzie negligently. "Some one they know by sight just come into the stalls. The _chic_ thing in the pit is to recognise, and to show by applause that you have recognised. The one that applauds the oftenest wins the game in the pit."

At those words and their tone Mr. Prohack looked at Ozzie with a new eye, as who should be thinking: "Is Sissie right about this fellow after all?"

Sissie sat down modestly and calmly next to her mother. Nobody could guess from her apparently ingenuous countenance that she knew that she, and not the Terror of the departments and his wife, was the originating cause of Mr. Morfey's grandiose hospitality.

"I suppose the stalls are full of celebrities?" said Eve.

"They're full of people who've paid twice the ordinary price for their seats," answered Ozzie.

"Who's that extraordinary old red-haired woman in the box opposite?" Eve demanded.

"That's Enid."

"Enid?"

"Yes. You know the Enid stove, don't you? All ladies know the Enid stove. It's been a household word for forty years. That's the original Enid. Her father invented the stove, and named it after her when she was a girl. She never misses a first-night."

"How extraordinary! Is she what you call a celebrity?"

"Rather!"

"Now," said Mr. Prohack. "Now, at last I understand the real meaning of fame."

"But that's Charlie down there!" exclaimed Eve, suddenly, pointing to the stalls and then looking behind her to see if there was not another Charlie in the box.

"Yes," Ozzie agreed. "Lady Massulam had an extra stall, and as five's a bit of a crowd in this box.... I thought he'd told you."

"He had not," said Eve.

The curtain went up, and this simple gesture on the part of the curtain evoked enormous applause. The audience could not control the expression of its delight. A young lady under a sunshade appeared; the mere fact of her existence threw the audience into a new ecstasy. An old man with a red nose appeared: similar demonstrations from the audience. When these two had talked to each other and sung to each other, the applause was tripled, and when the scene changed from Piccadilly Circus at 4 a.m. to the interior of a Spanish palace inhabited by illustrious French actors and actresses who proceeded to play an act of a tragedy by Corneille, the applause was quintupled. At the end of the tragedy the applause was decupled. Then the Spanish palace dissolved into an Abyssinian harem, and Eliza Fiddle in Abyssinian costume was discovered lying upon two thousand cushions of two thousand colours, and the audience rose at Eliza and Eliza rose at the audience, and the resulting frenzy was the sublimest frenzy that ever shook a theatre. The piece was stopped dead for three minutes while the audience and Eliza protested a mutual and unique passion. From this point onwards Mr. Prohack lost his head. He ran to and fro in the bewildering glittering maze of the piece, seeking for an explanation, for a sign-post, for a clue, for the slightest hint, and found nothing. He had no alternative but to cling to Eliza Fiddle, and he clung to her desperately. She was willing to be clung to. She gave herself, not only to Mr. Prohack, but to every member of the audience separately; she gave herself in the completeness of all her manifestations. The audience was rich in the possession of the whole of her individuality, which was a great deal. She sang, danced, chattered, froze, melted, laughed, cried, flirted, kissed, kicked, cursed, and turned somersaults with the fury of a dervish, the languor of an odalisque, and the inexhaustibility of a hot-spring geyser.... And at length Mr. Prohack grew aware of a feeling within himself that was at war with the fresh, fine feeling of physical well-being. "I have never seen a revue before," he said in secret. "Is it possible that I am bored?"


III


"Would you care to go behind and be introduced to Miss Fiddle?" Ozzie suggested at the interval after the curtain had been raised seventeen times in response to frantic shoutings, cheerings, thumpings and clappings, and the mighty tumult of exhilaration had subsided into a happy buzz that arose from all the seats in the entire orange-tinted brilliant auditorium. The ladies would not go; the ladies feared, they said, to impose their company upon Miss Fiddle in the tremendous strain of her activities. They spoke primly and decisively. It was true that they feared; but their fear was based on consideration for themselves rather than on consideration for Miss Fiddle. Ozzie was plainly snubbed. He had offered a wonderful privilege, and it had been disdained.

Mr. Prohack could not bear the spectacle of Ozzie's discomfiture. His sad weakness for pleasing people overcame him, and, putting his hand benevolently on the young man's shoulder, he said:

"My dear fellow, personally I'm dying to go."

They went by strangely narrow corridors and through iron doors across the stage, whose shirt-sleeved, ragged population seemed to be behaving as though the last trump had sounded, and so upstairs and along a broad passage full of doors ajar from which issued whispers and exclamations and transient visions of young women. From the star's dressing-room, at the end, a crowd of all sorts and conditions of persons was being pushed. Mr. Prohack trembled with an awful apprehension, and asked himself vainly what in the name of commonsense he was doing there, and prayed that Ozzie might be refused admission. The next moment he was being introduced to a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged dressing-gown. Her face was thickly caked with paint and powder, her eyes surrounded with rings of deepest black, her finger-nails red. Mr. Prohack, not without difficulty, recognised Eliza. A dresser stood on either side of her. Blinding showers of electric light poured down upon her defenceless but hardy form. She shook hands, but Mr. Prohack deemed that she ought to bear a notice: "Danger. Visitors are requested not to touch."

"So good of you to come round," she said, in her rich and powerful voice, smiling with all her superb teeth. Mr. Prohack, entranced, gazed, not as at a woman, but as at a public monument. Nevertheless he thought that she was not a bad kind, and well suited for the rough work of the world.

"I hope you're all coming to my ball to-night," said she. Mr. Prohack had never heard of any ball. In an instant she told him that she had remarked two most charming ladies with him in the box--(inordinate faculty of observation, mused Mr. Prohack)--and in another instant she was selling him three two guinea tickets for a grand ball and rout in aid of the West End Chorus Girls' Aid Association. Could he refuse, perceiving so clearly as he did that within the public monument was hiding a wistful creature, human like himself, human like his wife and daughter? He could not.

"Now you'll _come_?" said she.

Mr. Prohack swore that he would come, his heart sinking as he realised the consequence of his own foolish weakness. There was a knock at the door.

"Did you want me, Liza?" said a voice, and a fat gentleman, clothed with resplendent correctness, stepped into the room. It was the stage-manager, a god in his way.

Eliza Fiddle became a cyclone.

"I should think I did want you," she said passionately. "That's why I sent for you, and next time I'll ask you to come quicker. I'm not going to have that squint-eyed girl on the stage any more to-night. You know, the one at the end of the row. Twice she spoiled my exit by getting in the way. And you've got to throw her out, and take it from me. She does it on purpose."

"I can't throw her out without Mr. Chown's orders, and Mr. Chown's in Paris."

"Then you refuse?"

A pause.

"Yes."

"Then I'm not going on again to-night, not if I know it. I'm not going to be insulted in my own theatre."

"It's not the girl's fault. You