Mr. Prohack | Page 7

in the guests' dining-room, please.... No doubt
Bishop and I'll see you chaps upstairs later."
He went off to greet and welcome Bishop, full of joy at the prospect of
tasting anew the rich personality of his old friend. It is true that he had
a qualm about the expense of standing Bishop a lunch--a fellow who

relished his food and drink and could distinguish between the best and
the second best; but on the other hand he could talk very freely to
Bishop concerning the crisis in which he found himself; and he knew
that Bishop would not allow Bishop's affairs, however troublesome
they might be, unduly to bother him.
Bishop was not on the bench in the hall where visitors were appointed
to wait. Only one man was on the bench, a spectacled, red-faced person.
Mr. Prohack glanced about. Then the page-girl pointed to the
spectacled person, who jumped up and approached Mr. Prohack
somewhat effusively.
"How d'ye do, Prohack?"
"Well, Bishop!" Mr. Prohack responded. "It's you!"
It was another Bishop, a Bishop whom he had forgotten, a Bishop who
had resigned from the club earlier and disappeared. Mr. Prohack did not
like him. Mr. Prohack said to himself: "This fellow is after something,
and I always knew he was an adventurer."
"Funny feeling it gives you to be asked to wait in the hall of a club that
you used to belong to!" said Bishop.
The apparently simple words, heavy with sinister significance, sank
like a depth-charge into Mr. Prohack's consciousness.
"Among other things," said Mr. Prohack to himself, "this fellow is very
obviously after a free lunch."
Now Mr. Prohack suffered from a strange form of insincerity, which he
had often unsuccessfully tried to cure, partly because it advantaged
unsympathetic acquaintances at his expense, and partly because his
wife produced unanswerable arguments against it with mortal effect.
Although an unconceited man (as men go), and a very honest man, he
could not help pretending to like people whom he did not like. And he
pretended with a histrionic skill that deceived everybody--sometimes
even himself. There may have been some good-nature in this moral

twist of his; but he well knew that it originated chiefly in three morbid
desires,--the desire to please, the desire to do the easiest thing, and the
desire to nourish his reputation for amiability.
So that when the unexpected Mr. Bishop (whose Christian name was
Softly) said to him: "I won't keep you now. Only I was passing and I
want you to be kind enough to make an early appointment with me at
some time and place entirely convenient to yourself," Mr. Prohack
proceeded to persuade Mr. Bishop to stay to lunch, there being no sort
of reason in favour of such a course, and various sound reasons against
it. Mr. Prohack deceived Mr. Softly Bishop as follows:
"No time and place like the present. You must stay to lunch. This is
your old club and you must stay to lunch."
"But you've begun your lunch," Bishop protested.
"I've not. The fact is, I was half expecting you to look in again. The
hall-porter told me...." And Mr. Prohack actually patted Mr. Bishop on
the shoulder--a trick he had. "Come now, don't tell me you've got
another lunch appointment. It's twenty-five to two." And to himself,
leading Mr. Bishop to the strangers' dining-room, he said: "Why should
I further my own execution in this way?"
He ordered a lunch as copious and as costly as he would have ordered
for the other, the real Bishop. Powerful and vigorous in some directions,
Mr. Prohack's mentality was deplorably weak in at least one other.
Mr. Softly Bishop was delighted with his reception, and Mr. Prohack
began to admit that Mr. Bishop had some personal charm. Nevertheless
when the partridge came, Mr. Prohack acidly reflected:
"I'm offering this fellow a portion of my daughter's new frock on a
charger!"
They talked of the club, Mr. Bishop as a former member being surely
entitled to learn all about it, and then they talked about clubs in the
United States, where Mr. Bishop had spent recent years. But Mr.

Bishop persisted in giving no hint of his business.
"It must be something rather big and annoying," thought Mr. Prohack,
and ordered another portion of his daughter's new frock in the shape of
excellent cigars.
"You don't mean to say we can smoke here," exclaimed Mr. Bishop.
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Not in the members' coffee-room, but we can
here. Stroke of genius on the part of the Committee! You see it tends to
keep guests out of the smoking-room, which for a long time has been
getting uncomfortably full after lunch."
"Good God!" murmured Mr. Bishop simply.

IV
And he added at once, as he lighted the Corona Corona: