Book: Mr. Prohack

E >> E. Arnold Bennett >> Mr. Prohack



MR. PROHACK

BY

ARNOLD BENNETT

Author of "Clayhanger," etc.







CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I THE NEW POOR
II FROM THE DEAD
III THE LAW
IV EVE'S HEADACHE
V CHARLIE
VI SISSIE
VII THE SYMPATHETIC QUACK
VIII SISSIE'S BUSINESS
IX COLLISION
X THE THEORY OF IDLENESS
XI NEURASTHENIA CURED
XII THE PRACTICE OF IDLENESS
XIII FURTHER IDLENESS
XIV END OF AN IDLE DAY
XV THE HEAVY FATHER
XVI TRANSFER OF MIMI
XVII ROMANCE
XVIII A HOMELESS NIGHT
XIX THE RECEPTION
XX THE SILENT TOWER
XXI EVE'S MARTYRDOM
XXII MR. PROHACK'S TRIUMPH
XXIII THE YACHT





CHAPTER I

THE NEW POOR

I


Arthur Charles Prohack came downstairs at eight thirty, as usual, and
found breakfast ready in the empty dining-room. This pleased him,
because there was nothing in life he hated more than to be hurried. For
him, hell was a place of which the inhabitants always had an eye on the
clock and the clock was always further advanced than they had hoped.

The dining-room, simply furnished with reproductions of chaste
Chippendale, and chilled to the uncomfortable low temperature that hardy
Britons pretend to enjoy, formed part of an unassailably correct house
of mid-Victorian style and antiquity; and the house formed part of an
unassailably correct square just behind Hyde Park Gardens.
(Taxi-drivers, when told the name of the square, had to reflect for a
fifth of a second before they could recall its exact situation.)

Mr. Prohack was a fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a
beard. His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an
ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature. He was forty-six
years of age and looked it. He had been for more than twenty years at
the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain
importance. He was a Companion of the Bath. He exulted in the fact that
the Order of the Bath took precedence of those bumptious Orders, Star of
India, St. Michael and St. George, Indian Empire, Royal Victorian and
British Empire; but he laughed at his wife for so exulting. If the
matter happened to be mentioned he would point out that in the table of
precedence Companions of the Bath ranked immediately below Masters in
Lunacy.

He was proud of the Treasury's war record. Other departments of State
had swollen to amazing dimensions during the war. The Treasury, while
its work had been multiplied a hundredfold, had increased its personnel
by only a negligible percentage. It was the cheapest of all the
departments, the most efficient, and the most powerful. The War Office,
the Admiralty, and perhaps one other department presided over by a
personality whom the Prime Minister feared, did certainly defy and even
ignore the Treasury. But the remaining departments (and especially the
"mushroom ministries") might scheme as much as they liked,--they could
do nothing until the Treasury had approved their enterprises. Modest Mr.
Prohack was among the chief arbiters of destiny for them. He had daily
sat in a chair by himself and approved or disapproved according to his
conscience and the rules of the Exchequer; and his fiats, in practice,
had gone forth as the fiats of the Treasury. Moreover he could not be
bullied, for he was full of the sense that the whole constitution and
moral force of the British Empire stood waiting to back him. Scarcely
known beyond the Treasury, within the Treasury he had acquired a
reputation as "the terror of the departments." Several times irritated
Ministers or their high subordinates had protested that the Treasury's
(Mr. Prohack's) passion for rules, its demands for scientific evidence,
and its sceptical disposition were losing the war. Mr. Prohack had, in
effect retorted: "Departmentally considered, losing the war is a
detail." He had retorted: "Wild cats will not win the war." And he had
retorted: "I know nothing but my duty."

In the end the war was not lost, and Mr. Prohack reckoned that he
personally, by the exercise of courage in the face of grave danger, had
saved to the country five hundred and forty-six millions of the
country's money. At any rate he had exercised a real influence over the
conduct of the war. On one occasion, a chief being absent, he had had to
answer a summons to the Inner Cabinet. Of this occasion he had remarked
to his excited wife: "They were far more nervous than I was."

Despite all this, the great public had never heard of him. His portrait
had never appeared in the illustrated papers. His wife's portrait, as
"War-worker and wife of a great official," had never appeared in the
illustrated papers. No character sketch of him had ever been printed.
His opinions on any subject had never been telephonically or otherwise
demanded by the editors of up-to-date dailies. His news-value indeed was
absolutely nil. In _Who's Who_ he had only four lines of space.

Mr. Prohack's breakfast consisted of bacon, dry toast, coffee,
marmalade, _The Times_ and _The Daily Picture_. The latter was full of
brides and bridegrooms, football, enigmatic murder trials, young women
in their fluffy underclothes, medicines, pugilists, cinema stars, the
biggest pumpkin of the season, uplift, and inspired prophecy concerning
horses and company shares; together with a few brief unillustrated notes
about civil war in Ireland, famine in Central Europe, and the collapse
of realms.


II


"Ah! So I've caught you!" said his wife, coming brightly into the room.
She was a buxom woman of forty-three. Her black hair was elaborately
done for the day, but she wore a roomy peignoir instead of a frock; it
was Chinese, in the Imperial yellow, inconceivably embroidered with
flora, fauna, and grotesques. She always thus visited her husband at
breakfast, picking bits off his plate like a bird, and proving to him
that her chief preoccupation was ever his well-being and the
satisfaction of his capricious tastes.

"Many years ago," said Mr. Prohack.

"You make a fuss about buying _The Daily Picture_ for me. You say it
humiliates you to see it in the house, and I don't know what. But I
catch you reading it yourself, and before you've opened _The Times_!
Dear, dear! That bacon's a cinder and I daren't say anything to her."

"Lady," replied Mr. Prohack, "we all have something base in our natures.
Sin springs from opportunity. I cannot resist the damned paper." And he
stuck his fork into the fair frock-coat of a fatuous bridegroom coming
out of church.

"My fault again!" the wife remarked brightly.

The husband changed the subject:

"I suppose that your son and daughter are still asleep?"

"Well, dearest, you know that they were both at that dance last night."

"They ought not to have been. The popular idea that life is a shimmy is
a dangerous illusion." Mr. Prohack felt the epigram to be third-rate,
but he carried it off lightly.

"Sissie only went because Charlie wanted to go, and all I can say is
that it's a nice thing if Charlie isn't to be allowed to enjoy himself
now the war's over--after all he's been through."

"You're mixing up two quite different things. I bet that if Charlie
committed murder you'd go into the witness-box and tell the judge he'd
been wounded twice and won the Military Cross."

"This is one of your pernickety mornings."

"Seeing that your debauched children woke me up at three fifteen--!"

"They woke me up too."

"That's different. You can go to sleep again. I can't. You rather like
being wakened up, because you take a positively sensual pleasure in
turning over and going to sleep again."

"You hate me for that."

"I do."

"I make you very unhappy sometimes, don't I?"

"Eve, you are a confounded liar, and you know it. You have never caused
me a moment's unhappiness. You may annoy me. You may exasperate me. You
are frequently unspeakable. But you have never made me unhappy. And why?
Because I am one of the few exponents of romantic passion left in this
city. My passion for you transcends my reason. I am a fool, but I am a
magnificent fool. And the greatest miracle of modern times is that after
twenty-four years of marriage you should be able to give me pleasure by
perching your stout body on the arm of my chair as you are doing."

"Arthur, I'm not stout."

"Yes, you are. You're enormous. But hang it, I'm such a morbid fool I
like you enormous."

Mrs. Prohack, smiling mysteriously, remarked in a casual tone, as she
looked at _The Daily Picture_:

"Why _do_ people let their photographs get into the papers? It's awfully
vulgar."

"It is. But we're all vulgar to-day. Look at that!" He pointed to the
page. "The granddaughter of a duke who refused the hand of a princess
sells her name and her face to a firm of ship-owners who keep newspapers
like their grandfathers kept pigeons.... But perhaps I'm only making a
noise like a man of fifty."

"You aren't fifty."

"I'm five hundred. And this coffee is remarkably thin."

"Let me taste it."

"Yes, you'd rob me of my coffee now!" said Mr. Prohack, surrendering his
cup. "Is it thin, or isn't it? I pride myself on living the higher life;
my stomach is not my inexorable deity; but even on the mountain top
which I inhabit there must be a limit to the thinness of the coffee."

Eve (as he called her, after the mother and prototype of all women--her
earthly name was Marian) sipped the coffee. She wrinkled her forehead
and then glanced at him in trouble.

"Yes, it's thin," she said. "But I've had to ration the cook. Oh,
Arthur, I _am_ going to make you unhappy after all. It's impossible for
me to manage any longer on the housekeeping allowance."

"Why didn't you tell me before, child?"

"I have told you 'before,'" said she. "If you hadn't happened to mention
the coffee, I mightn't have said anything for another fortnight. You
started to give me more money in June, and you said that was the utmost
limit you could go to, and I believed it was. But it isn't enough. I
hate to bother you, and I feel ashamed--"

"That's ridiculous. Why should you feel ashamed?"

"Well, I'm like that."

"You're revelling in your own virtuousness, my girl. Now in last week's
_Economist_ it said that the Index Number of commodity prices had
slightly fallen these last few weeks."

"I don't know anything about indexes and the _Economist_," Eve retorted.
"But I know what coffee is a pound, and I know what the tradesmen's
books are--"

At this point she cried without warning.

"No," murmured Mr. Prohack, soothingly, caressingly. "You mustn't
baptise me. I couldn't bear it." And he kissed her eyes.




III


"I _know_ we can't afford any more for housekeeping," she whispered,
sniffing damply. "And I'm ashamed I can't manage, and I knew I should
make you unhappy. What with idle and greedy working-men, and all these
profiteers...! It's a shame!"

"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "It's what our Charlie fought for, and got
wounded twice for, and won the M.C. for. That's what it is. But you see
we're the famous salaried middle-class that you read so much about in
the papers, and we're going through the famous process of being crushed
between the famous upper and nether millstones. Those millstones have
been approaching each other--and us--for some time. Now they've begun to
nip. That funny feeling in your inside that's causing you still to
baptise me, in spite of my protest--that's the first real nip."

She caught her breath.

"Arthur," she said. "If you go on like that I shall scream."

"Do," Mr. Prohack encouraged her. "But of course not too loud. At the
same time don't forget that I'm a humourist. Humourists make jokes when
they're happy, and when they're unhappy they make jokes."

"But it's horribly serious."

"Horribly."

Mrs. Prohack slipped off the arm of the chair. Her body seemed to
vibrate within the Chinese gown, and she effervesced into an ascending
and descending series of sustained laughs.

"That's hysteria," said Mr. Prohack. "And if you don't stop I shall be
reluctantly compelled to throw the coffee over you. Water would be
better, but there is none."

Then Eve ceased suddenly.

"To think," she remarked with calmness, "that you're called the Terror
of the Departments, and you're a great authority on finance, and you've
been in the Government service for nearly twenty-five years, and always
done your duty--"

"Child," Mr. Prohack interrupted her. "Don't tell me what I know. And
try not to be surprised at any earthly phenomena. There are people who
are always being astonished by the most familiar things. They live on
earth as if they'd just dropped from Mars on to a poor foreign planet.
It's not a sign of commonsense. You've lived on earth now for--shall we
say?--some twenty-nine or thirty years, and if you don't know the place
you ought to. I assure you that there is nothing at all unusual in our
case. We are perfectly innocent; we are even praiseworthy; and yet--we
shall have to suffer. It's quite a common case. You've read of thousands
and millions of such cases; you've heard of lots personally; and you've
actually met a few. Well, now, you yourself _are_ a case. That's all."

Mrs. Prohack said impatiently:

"I consider the Government's treated you shamefully. Why, we're much
worse off than we were before the war."

"The Government has treated me shamefully. But then it's treated
hundreds of thousands of men shamefully. All Governments do."

"But we have a position to keep up!"

"True. That's where the honest poor have the advantage of us. You see,
we're the dishonest poor. We've been to the same schools and
universities and we talk the same idiom and we have the same manners and
like the same things as people who spend more in a month or a week than
we spend in a year. And we pretend, and they pretend, that they and we
are exactly the same. We aren't, you know. We're one vast pretence. Has
it occurred to you, lady, that we've never possessed a motor-car and
most certainly never shall possess one? Yet look at the hundreds of
thousands of cars in London alone! And not a single one of them ours!
This detail may have escaped you."

"I wish you wouldn't be silly, Arthur."

"I am not silly. On the contrary, my real opinion is that I'm the wisest
man you ever met in your life--not excepting your son It remains that
we're a pretence. A pretence resembles a bladder. It may burst. We
probably shall burst. Still, we have one great advantage over the honest
poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who
never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. _We know exactly
where we are_. We know to the nearest sixpence."

"I don't see that that helps us. I consider the Government has treated
you shamefully. I wonder you important men in the Treasury haven't
formed a Trade Union before now."

"Oh, Eve! After all you've said about Trade Unions this last year! You
shock me! We shall never he properly treated until we do form a Trade
Union. But we shall never form a Trade Union, because we're too proud.
And we'd sooner see our children starve than yield in our pride. That's
a fact."

"There's one thing--we can't move into a cheaper house."

"No," Mr. Prohack concurred. "Because there isn't one."

Years earlier Mr. Prohack had bought the long lease of his house from
the old man who, according to the logical London system, had built the
house upon somebody else's land on the condition that he paid rent for
the land and in addition gave the house to the somebody else at the end
of a certain period as a free gift. By a payment of twelve pounds per
annum Mr. Prohack was safe for forty years yet and he calculated that in
forty years the ownership of the house would be a matter of some
indifference both to him and to his wife.

"Well, as you're so desperately wise, perhaps you'll kindly tell me what
we _are_ to do."

"I might borrow money on my insurance policy--and speculate," said Mr.
Prohack gravely.

"Oh! Arthur! Do you really think you--" Marian showed a wild gleam of
hope.

"Or I might throw the money into the Serpentine," Mr. Prohack added.

"Oh! Arthur! I could kill you. I never know how to take you."

"No, you never do. That's the worst of a woman like you marrying a man
like me."

They discussed devices. One servant fewer. No holiday. Cinemas instead
of theatres. No books. No cigarettes. No taxis. No clothes. No meat. No
telephone. No friends. They reached no conclusion. Eve referred to
Adam's great Treasury mind. Adam said that his great Treasury mind
should function on the problem during the day, and further that the
problem must be solved that very night.

"I'll tell you one thing I shall do," said Mrs. Prohack in a decided
tone as Mr. Prohack left the table. "I shall countermand Sissie'a new
frock."

"If you do I shall divorce you," was the reply.

"But why?"

Mr. Prohack answered:

"In 1917 I saw that girl in dirty overalls driving a thundering great
van down Whitehall. Yesterday I met her in her foolish high heels and
her shocking openwork stockings and her negligible dress and her exposed
throat and her fur stole, and she was so delicious and so absurd and so
futile and so sure of her power that--that--well, you aren't going to
countermand any new frock. That chit has the right to ruin me--not
because of anything she's done, but because she _is_. I am ready to
commit peccadilloes, but not crimes. Good morning, my dove."

And at the door, discreetly hiding her Chinese raiment behind the door,
Eve said, as if she had only just thought of it, though she had been
thinking of it for quite a quarter of an hour:

"Darling, there's your clubs."

"What about my clubs?"

"Don't they cost you a lot of money?"

"No. Besides I lunch at my clubs--better and cheaper than at any
restaurant. And I shouldn't have time to come home for lunch."

"But do you need two clubs?"

"I've always belonged to two clubs. Every one does."

"But why _two_?"

"A fellow must have a club up his sleeve."

"_Couldn't_ you give up one?"

"Lady, it's unthinkable. You don't know what you're suggesting. Abandon
one of my clubs that my father put me up for when I was a boy! I'd as
soon join a Trade Union. No! My innocent but gluttonous children shall
starve first."

"I shall give up _my_ club!"

"Ah! But that's different."

"How is it different?" "You scarcely ever speak to a soul in your club.
The food's bad in your club. They drink liqueurs before dinner at your
club. I've seen 'em. Your club's full every night of the most formidable
spinsters each eating at a table alone. Give up your club by all means.
Set fire to it and burn it down. But don't count the act as a
renunciation. You hate your club. Good morning, my dove."


IV

One advantage of the situation of Mr. Prohack's house was that his path
therefrom to the Treasury lay almost entirely through verdant
parks--Hyde Park, the Green Park, St. James's Park. Not infrequently he
referred to the advantage in terms of bland satisfaction. True, in wet
weather the advantage became a disadvantage.

During his walk through verdant parks that morning, the Terror of the
Departments who habitually thought in millions was very gloomy.
Something resembling death was in his heart. Humiliation also was
certainly in his heart, for he felt that, no matter whose the fault, he
was failing in the first duty of a man. He raged against the Chancellor
of the Exchequer. He sliced off the head of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer with his stick. (But it was only an innocent autumn
wildflower, perilously blooming.) And the tang in the air foretold the
approach of winter and the grip of winter--the hell of the poor.

Near Whitehall he saw the advertisement of a firm of shop-specialists:

"BRING YOUR BUSINESS TROUBLES TO US."




CHAPTER II

FROM THE DEAD

I



"WELL, Milton, had a good holiday?" said Mr. Prohack to the hall-porter
on entering his chief club for lunch that day.

"No, sir," said the hall-porter, who was a realist.

"Ah, well," said Mr. Prohack soothingly. "Perhaps not a bad thing.
There's nothing like an unsatisfactory holiday for reconciling us all to
a life of toil, is there?"

"No, sir," said Milton, impassively, and added: "Mr. Bishop has just
called to see you, sir. I told him you'd probably be in shortly. He said
he wouldn't wait but he might look in again."

"Thanks," said Mr. Prohack. "If he does, I shall be either in the
coffee-room or upstairs."

Mr. Prohack walked into the majestic interior of the Club, which had
been closed, rather later than usual, for its annual cleaning. He
savoured anew and more sharply the beauty and stateliness of its
architecture, the elaboration of its conveniences, the severe splendour
of its luxury. And he saw familiar and congenial faces, and on every
face was a mild joy similar to the joy which he himself experienced in
the reopening of the Club. And he was deliciously aware of the "club
feeling," unlike, and more agreeable than, any other atmosphere of an
organism in the world.

The Club took no time at all to get into its stride after the closure.
It opened its doors and was instantly its full self. For hundreds of
grave men in and near London had risen that very morning from their beds
uplifted by the radiant thought: "To-day I can go to the Club again."
Mr. Prohack had long held that the noblest, the most civilised
achievement of the British character was not the British Empire, nor the
House of Commons, nor the steam-engine, nor aniline dyes, nor the
music-hall, but a good West End club. And somehow at the doors of a good
West End club there was an invisible magic sieve, through which the
human body could pass but through which human worries could not pass.

This morning, however, Mr. Prohack perceived that one worry could pass
through the sieve, namely a worry concerning the Club itself.... Give
up the Club? Was the sacrifice to be consummated? Impossible! Could he
picture himself strolling down St. James's Street without the right to
enter the sacred gates--save as a guest? And supposing he entered as a
guest, could he bear the hall-porter to say to him: "If you'll take a
seat, sir, I'll send and see if Mr. Blank is in the Club. What name,
sir?" Impossible! Yet Milton would be capable of saying just that.
Milton would never pardon a defection.... Well, then, he must give up
the other club. But the other--and smaller--Club had great qualities of
its own. Indeed it was indispensable. And could he permit the day to
dawn on which he would no longer be entitled to refer to "my other
club"? Impossible! Nevertheless he had decided to give up his other
club. He must give it up, if only to keep even with his wife. The
monetary saving would be unimportant, but the act would be spectacular.
And Mr. Prohack perfectly comprehended the value of the spectacular in
existence.


II

He sat down to lunch among half a dozen cronies at one of the larger
tables in a window-embrasure of the vaulted coffee-room with its
precious portrait of that historic clubman, Charles James Fox, and he
ordered himself the cheapest meal that the menu could offer, and poured
himself out a glass of water.

"Same old menu!" remarked savagely Mr. Prohack's great crony, Sir Paul
Spinner, the banker, who suffered from carbuncles and who always drove
over from the city in the middle of the day.

"Here's old Paul grumbling again!" said Sims of Downing Street. "After
all, this is the best club in London."

"It certainly is," said Mr. Prohack, "when it's closed. During the past
four weeks this club has been the most perfect institution on the face
of the earth."

They all laughed. And they began recounting to each other the
unparalleled miseries and indignities which such of them as had remained
in London had had to endure in the clubs that had "extended their
hospitality" to members of the closed club. The catalogue of ills was
terrible. Yes, there was only one club deserving of the name.

"Still," said Sir Paul. "They might give us a rest from prunes and
rice."

"This club," said Mr. Prohack, "like all other clubs, is managed by a
committee of Methuselahs who can only digest prunes and rice." And
after a lot more talk about the idiosyncrasies of clubs he said, with a
casual air: "For myself, I belong to too many clubs."

Said Hunter, a fellow official of the Treasury:

"But I thought you only had two clubs, Arthur."

"Only two. But it's one too many. In fact I'm not sure if it isn't two
too many."

"Are you getting disgusted with human nature?" Sims suggested.

"No," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm getting hard up. I've committed the
greatest crime in the world. I've committed poverty. And I feel guilty."

And the truth was that he did feel guilty. He was entirely innocent; he
was a victim; he had left undone nothing that he ought to have done; but
he felt guilty, thus proving that poverty is indeed seriously a crime
and that those who in sardonic jest describe it as a crime are deeper
philosophers than they suppose.

"Never say die," smiled the monocled Mixon, a publisher of scientific
works, and began to inveigh against the Government as an ungrateful and
unscrupulous employer and exploiter of dutiful men in an inferno of
rising prices. But the rest thought Mixon unhappy in his choice of
topic. Hunter of the Treasury said nothing. What was there to say that
would not tend to destroy the true club atmosphere? Even the beloved
Prohack had perhaps failed somewhat in tact. They all understood, they
all mildly sympathised, but they could do no more--particularly in a
miscellaneous assemblage of eight members. No, they felt a certain
constraint; and in a club constraint should be absolutely unknown. Some
of them glanced uneasily about the crowded, chattering room.

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