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Mr. Prohack, a novel by Arnold Bennett |
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Chapter 3. The Law |
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_ CHAPTER III. THE LAW His tranquil tone disguised the immense anarchy within. Silas Angmering had evidently been what is called a profiteer. He had made his money "out of the war." And Silas was an Englishman. While Englishmen, and--later--Americans, had given up lives, sanity, fortunes, limbs, eyesight, health, Silas had gained riches. There was nothing highly unusual in this. Mr. Prohack had himself seen, in the very club in which he was now entertaining Softly Bishop, a man who had left an arm in France chatting and laughing with a man who had picked up over a million pounds by following the great principle that a commodity is worth what it will fetch when people want it very badly and there is a shortage of it. Mr. Prohack too had often chatted and laughed with this same picker-up of a million, who happened to be a quite jolly and generous fellow. Mr. Prohack would have chatted and laughed with Barabbas, convinced as he was that iniquity is the result of circumstances rather than of deliberate naughtiness. He seldom condemned. He had greatly liked Silas Angmering, who was a really educated and a well-intentioned man with a queer regrettable twist in his composition. That Silas should have profiteered when he got the chance was natural. Most men would do the same. Most heroes would do the same. The man with one arm would conceivably do the same. But between excusing and forgiving a brigand (who has not despoiled _you_), and sharing his plunder, there was a gap, a chasm. Few facts gave Mr. Prohack a more serene and proud satisfaction than the fact that he had materially lost through the war. He was positively glad that he had lost, and that the Government, his employer, had treated him badly.... And now to become the heir of a profiteer! Nor was that all! To become the co-heir with a woman of dubious renown, and with Mr. Softly Bishop! He knew nothing about the woman, and would think nothing. But he knew a little about Mr. Softly Bishop. Mr. Bishop, it used to be known and said in the club, had never had a friend. He had the usual number of acquaintances, but no relationship more intimate. Mr. Prohack, in the old days, had not for a long time actively disliked Mr. Bishop; but he had been surprised at the amount of active dislike which contact with Mr. Bishop engendered in other members of the club. Why such dislike? Was it due to his fat, red face, his spectacles, his conspiratorial manner, tone and gait, the evenness of his temper, his cautiousness, his mysteriousness? Nobody knew. In the end Mr. Prohack also had succeeded in disliking him. But Mr. Prohack produced a reason, and that reason was Mr. Bishop's first name. On it being pointed out to Mr. Prohack by argufiers that Mr. Bishop was not responsible for his first name, Mr. Prohack would reply that the mentality of parents capable of bestowing on an innocent child the Christian name of Softly was incomprehensible and in a high degree suspicious, and that therefore by the well-known laws of heredity there must be something devilish odd in the mentality of their offspring--especially seeing that the offspring pretended to glory in the Christian name as being a fine old English name. No! Mr. Prohack might stomach co-heirship with a far-off dubious woman; but could he stomach co-heirship with Softly Bishop? It would necessitate friendship with Mr. Bishop. It would bracket him for ever with Mr. Bishop. These various considerations, however, had little to do with the immense inward anarchy that Mr. Prohack's tone had concealed as he musingly murmured: "Do I really?" The disturbance was due almost exclusively to a fierce imperial joy in the prospect of immediate wealth. The origin of the wealth scarcely affected him. The associations of the wealth scarcely affected him. He understood in a flash the deep wisdom of that old proverb (whose truth he had often hitherto denied) that money has no smell. Perhaps there might be forty good reasons against his accepting the inheritance, but they were all ridiculous. Was he to abandon his share of the money to Softly Bishop and the vampire-woman? Such a notion was idiotic. It was contrary to the robust and matter-of-fact commonsense which always marked his actions--if not his theories. No more should his wife be compelled to scheme out painfully the employment of her housekeeping allowance. Never again should there be a question about a new frock for his daughter. He was conscious, before anything else, of a triumphant protective and spoiling tenderness for his women. He would be absurd with his women. He would ruin their characters with kindness and with invitations to be capricious and exacting and expensive and futile. They nobly deserved it. He wanted to shout and to sing and to tell everybody that he would not in future stand any d----d nonsense from anybody. He would have his way. "Why!" thought he, pulling himself up. "I've developed all the peculiarities of a millionaire in about a minute and a half." And again, he cried to himself, in the vast and imperfectly explored jungle that every man calls his heart: "Ah! I could not have borne to give up either of my clubs! No! I was deceiving myself. I could not have done it! I could not have done it! Anything rather than that. I see it now.... By the way, I wonder what all the fellows will say when they know! And how shall I break it to them? Not to-day! Not to-day! To-morrow!" At the moment when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering estate. Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty called him elsewhere. "Does that matter--now?" said Bishop, and his accents were charged with meaning. Mr. Prohack saw that it did not matter, and that in future any nation that did not like his office-hours would have to lump them. He feared greatly lest he might encounter some crony-member on his way out of the club with Bishop. If he did, what should he say, how should he carry off the situation? (For he was feeling mysteriously guilty, just as he had felt guilty an hour earlier. Not guilty as the inheritor of profiteering in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor. It might have been different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say of five thousand pounds every six months. But a hundred thousand unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still in the smoking-room. He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly. Bishop had a big motor-car waiting at the door. III He offered no remark as to the car, and Mr. Prohack offered no remark. But Mr. Prohack was very interested in the car--he who had never been interested in cars. And he was interested in the clothes and in the deportment of the chauffeur. He was indeed interested in all sorts of new things. The window of a firm of house-agents who specialised in country houses, the jewellers' shops, the big hotels, the advertisements of theatres and concerts, the establishments of trunk-makers and of historic second-hand booksellers and of equally historic wine-merchants. He saw them all with a fresh eye. London suddenly opened to him its possibilities as a bud opens its petals. "Not a bad car they; hired out to me," said Bishop at length, with casual approval. "You've hired it?" "Oh, yes!" And shortly afterwards Bishop said: "It's fantastic the number of cars there are in use in America. You know it's a literal fact that almost every American family has a car. For instance, whenever there's a big meeting of strikers in New York, all the streets near the hall are blocked with cars." Mr. Prohack had food for reflection. His outlook upon life was changed. And later Bishop said, again apropos of nothing: "Of course it's only too true that the value of money has fallen by about half. But on the other hand interest has about doubled. You can get ten per cent on quite safe security in these days. Even Governments have to pay about seven--as you know." "Yes," concurred Mr. Prohack. Ten thousand pounds a year! And then he thought: "What an infernal nuisance it would be if there was a revolution! Oh! But there couldn't be. It's unthinkable. Revolution everywhere, yes; but not in England or America!" And he saw with the most sane and steady insight that the final duty of a Government was to keep order. Change there must be, but let change come gradually. Injustices must be remedied, naturally, but without any upheaval! Yet in the club some of the cronies (and he among them), after inveighing against profiteers and against the covetousness of trades unions, had often held that "a good red revolution" was the only way of knocking sense into the heads of these two classes. The car got involved in a block of traffic near the Mansion House, and rain began to fall. The two occupants of the car watched each other surreptitiously, mutually suspicious, like dogs. Scraps of talk were separated by long intervals. Mr. Prohack wondered what the deuce Softly Bishop had done that Angmering should leave him a hundred thousand pounds. He tried to feel grief for the tragic and untimely death of his old friend Angmering, and failed. No doubt the failure was due to the fact that he had not seen Angmering for so many years. At last Mr. Prohack, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out, his gaze uplifted, he said suddenly: "I suppose it'll hold water?" "What? The roof of the car?" "No. The will." Mr. Softly Bishop gave a short laugh, but made no other answer. IV The car halted finally before an immense new block of buildings, and the inheritors floated up to the fifth floor in a padded lift manned by a brilliantly-uniformed attendant. Mr. Prohack saw "Smathe and Smathe" in gilt on a glass door. The enquiry office resembled the ante-room of a restaurant, as the whole building resembled a fashionable hotel. Everywhere was mosaic flooring. "Mr. Percy Smathe?" demanded Bishop of a clerk whose head glittered in the white radiance of a green-shaded lamp. "I'll see, sir. Please step into the waiting-room." And he waved a patronising negligent hand. "What name?" he added. "Have you forgotten my name already?" Mr. Bishop retorted sharply. "Bishop. Tell Mr. Percy Smathe I'm here. At once, please." And he led Mr. Prohack to the waiting-room, which was a magnificent apartment with stained glass windows, furnished in Chippendale similar to, but much finer than, the furnishing of Mr. Prohack's own house. On the table were newspapers and periodicals. Not _The Engineering Times_ of April in the previous year or a _Punch_ of the previous decade, and _The Vaccination Record_; but such things as the current _Tatler, Times, Economist_, and _La Vie Parisienne._ Mr. Prohack had uncomfortable qualms of apprehension. For several minutes past he had been thinking: "Suppose there _is_ something up with that will!" He had little confidence in Mr. Softly Bishop. And now the aspect of the solicitors' office frightened him. It had happened to him, being a favourite trustee of his relations and friends, to visit the offices of some of the first legal firms in Lincoln's Inn Fields. You entered these lairs by a dirty door and a dirty corridor and another dirty door. You were interrogated by a shabby clerk who sat on a foul stool at a foul desk in a foul office. And finally after an interval in a cubby hole that could not boast even _The Anti-Vaccination Record_, you were driven along a dirtier passage into a dirtiest room whose windows were obscured by generations of filth, and in that room sat a spick and span lawyer of great name who was probably an ex-president of the Incorporated Law Society. The offices of Smathe and Smathe corresponded with alarming closeness to Mr. Prohack's idea of what a bucket-shop might be. Mr. Prohack had the gravest fears for his hundred thousand pounds. "This is the solicitor's office new style," said Bishop, who seemed to have an uncanny gift of reading thoughts. "Very big firm. Anglo-American. Smathe and Smathe are two cousins. Percy's American. English mother. They specialise in what I may call the international complication business, pleasant and unpleasant." Mr. Prohack was not appreciably reassured. Then a dapper, youngish man with a carnation in his buttonhole stepped neatly into the room, and greeted Bishop in a marked American accent. "Here I am again," said Bishop curtly. "Mr. Prohack, may I introduce Mr. Percy Smathe?" "Mr. Prohack, I'm delighted to make your acquaintance." Mr. Prohack beheld the lawyer's candid, honest face, heard his tones of extreme deference, and noted that he had come to the enquiry room to fetch his clients. "There's only one explanation of this," said Mr. Prohack to himself. "I'm a genuinely wealthy person." And in Mr. Percy Smathe's private room he listened but carelessly to a long legal recital. Details did not interest him. He knew he was all right. _ |
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