Mr. Prohack. Arnold Bennett
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