Mr. Prohack | Page 9

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!"
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