III
Having received no suggestion from his daughter as to how he should dispose of himself while awaiting her leisure, Mr. Prohack made his way back to the guardian's cubicle. And there he discovered a chubby and intentionally-young man in the act of gazing through the small window into the studio exactly as he himself had been gazing a few minutes earlier.
"Hello, Prohack!" exclaimed the chubby and intentionally-young man, with the utmost geniality and calmness.
"How d'ye do?" responded Mr. Prohack with just as much calmness and perhaps ten per cent less geniality. Mr. Prohack was a peculiar fellow, and that on this occasion he gave rather less geniality than he received was due to the fact that he had never before spoken to the cupid in his life and that he was wondering whether membership of the same club entirely justified so informal a mode of address—without an introduction and outside the club premises. For, like all modest men, Mr. Prohack had some sort of a notion of his own dignity, a sort of a notion that occasionally took him quite by surprise. Mr. Prohack did not even know the surname of his aggressor. He only knew that he never overheard other men call him anything but "Ozzie." Had not Mr. Prohack been buried away all his life in the catacombs of the Treasury and thus cut off from the great world-movement, he would have been fully aware that Oswald Morfey was a person of importance in the West End of London, that he was an outstanding phenomenon of the age, that he followed very closely all the varying curves of the great world-movement, that he was constantly to be seen on the pavements of Piccadilly, Bond Street, St. James's Street, Pall Mall and Hammersmith, that he was never absent from a good first night or a private view of very new or very old pictures or a distinguished concert or a poetry-reading or a fashionable auction at Christie's, that he received invitations to dinner for every night in the week and accepted all those that did not clash with the others, that in return for these abundant meals he gave about once a month a tea-party in his trifling Japanese flat in Bruton Street, where the sandwiches were as thin as the sound of the harpsichord which eighteenth century ladies played at his request; and that he was in truth what Mr. Asprey Chown called "social secretary" to Mr. Asprey Chown.
Mr. Prohack might be excused for his ignorance of this last fact, for the relation between Asprey Chown and Ozzie was never very clearly defined—at any rate by Ozzie. He had no doubt learned, from an enforced acquaintance with the sides of motor-omnibuses, that Mr. Asprey Chown was a theatre-manager of some activity, but he certainly had not truly comprehended that Mr. Asprey Chown was head of one of the two great rival theatrical combines and reputed to be the most accomplished showman in the Western hemisphere, with a jewelled finger in notable side-enterprises such as prize-fights, restaurants, and industrial companies. The knowing ones from whom naught is hidden held that Asprey Chown had never given a clearer proof of genius than in engaging this harmless and indefatigable parasite of the West End to be his social secretary. The knowing ones said further that whereas Ozzie was saving money, nobody could be sure that Asprey Chown was saving money. The engagement had a double effect—it at once put Asprey Chown into touch with everything that could be useful to him for the purposes of special booming, and it put Ozzie into touch with half the theatrical stars of London—in an age when a first-rate heroine of revue was worth at least two duchesses and a Dame in the scale of social values.
Mr. Oswald Morfey, doubtless in order to balance the modernity of his taste in the arts, wore a tight black stock and a wide eyeglass ribbon in the daytime, and in the evening permitted himself to associate a soft silk shirt with a swallow-tail coat. It was to Mr. Prohack's secondary (and more exclusive) club that he belonged. Inoffensive though he was, he had managed innocently to offend Mr. Prohack. "Who is the fellow?" Mr. Prohack had once asked a friend in the club, and having received no answer but "Ozzie," Mr. Prohack had added: "He's a perfect ass," and had given as a reason for this harsh judgment: "Well, I can't stick the way he walks across the hall."
In the precincts of the dance-studio Mr. Oswald Morfey said in that simple, half-lisping tone and with that wide-open child-like glance that characterised most of his remarks:
"A very prosperous little affair here!" Having said this, he let his eyeglass fall into the full silkiness of his shirt-front, and turned and smiled very amicably and agreeably on Mr. Prohack, who could not help thinking: "Perhaps after all you aren't such a bad sort of an idiot."
"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Do you often get as far as Putney?" For Mr. Oswald Morfey, enveloped as he unquestionably was in the invisible aura of the West End, seemed conspicuously out of place in a dance-studio in a side-street in Putney, having rather the air of an angelic visitant.
"Well, now I come to think of it, I don't!" Mr. Morfey answered nearly all questions as though they were curious, disconcerting questions that took him by surprise. This mannerism was universally attractive—until you got tired of it.
Mr. Prohack was now faintly attracted by it,—so that he said, in a genuine attempt at good-fellowship:
"You know I can't for the life of me remember your name. You must excuse me. My memory for names is not what it was. And I hate to dissemble, don't you?"
The announcement was a grave shock to Mr. Oswald Morfey, who imagined that half the taxi-drivers in London knew him by sight. Nevertheless he withstood the shock like a little man of the world, and replied with miraculous and sincere politeness: "I'm sure there's no reason why you should remember my name." And he vouchsafed his name.
"Of course! Of course!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack, with a politeness equally miraculous, for the word "Morfey" had no significance for the benighted official. "How stupid of me!"
"By the way," said Mr. Morfey in a lower, confidential tone. "Your Eagle will be ready to-morrow instead of next week."
"My Eagle?"
"Your new car."
It was Mr. Prohack's turn to be staggered, and to keep his nerve. Not one word had he heard about the purchase of a car since Charlie's telegram from Glasgow. He had begun to think that his wife had either forgotten the necessity of a car or was waiting till his more complete recovery before troubling him to buy it. And he had taken care to say nothing about it himself, for he had discovered, upon searching his own mind, that his interest in motor-cars was not an authentic interest and that he had no desire at all to go motoring in pursuit of health. And lo! Eve had been secretly engaged in the purchase of a car for him! Oh! A remarkable woman, Eve: she would stop at nothing when his health was in question. Not even at a two thousand pound car.
"Ah, yes!" said Mr. Prohack, with as much tranquillity as though his habit was to buy a car once a week or so. "To-morrow, you say? Good!" Was the fellow then a motor-car tout working on commission?
"You see," said Ozzie, "my old man owns a controlling interest in the Eagle Company. That's how I happen to know."
"I see," murmured Mr. Prohack, speculating wildly in private as to the identity of Ozzie's old man.
When Ozzie with a nod and a smile and a re-fixing of his monocle left the cubicle to enter the studio, he left Mr. Prohack freshly amazed at the singularities of the world and of women, even the finest women. How disturbing to come down to Putney in a taxi-cab in order to learn from a stranger that you have bought a two thousand pound car which is to come into your possession on the morrow! The dangerousness, the excitingness, of being rich struck Mr. Prohack very forcibly.
A few minutes later he beheld a sight which affected him more deeply, and less pleasantly, than anything else in an evening of thunderclaps. Through the little window he saw Sissie dancing with Ozzie Morfey. And although Sissie was not gazing upward ecstatically into Ozzie's face—she could not because they were of a size—and although her features had a rather stern, fixed expression, Mr. Prohack knew, from his knowledge of her, that Sissie was in a secret ecstasy of enjoyment while dancing with this man. He did not like her ecstasy. Was it possible that she, so sensible and acute, had failed to perceive that the fellow was a perfect ass? For in spite of his amiability, a perfect ass the fellow was. The sight of his Sissie held in the arms of Ozzie Morfey revolted Mr. Prohack. But he was once again helpless. And the most sinister suspicions crawled into his mind. Why was the resplendent, the utterly correct Ozzie dancing in a dancing studio in Putney? Certainly he was not there to learn dancing. He danced to perfection. The feet of the partners seemed to be married into a mystic unity of direction. The performance was entrancing to watch. Could it be possible that Ozzie was there because Sissie was there? Darker still, could it be possible that Sissie had taken a share in the studio for any reason other than a purely commercial reason?
"He thinks you're a darling," said Sissie to her father afterwards when he and she and Eliza Brating, alone together in the studio, were informally consuming buns and milk in the corner where the stove was.
The talk ran upon dancers, and whether Ozzie Morfey was not one of the finest dancers in London. Was Sissie's tone quite natural? Mr. Prohack could not be sure. Eliza Brating said she must go at once in order not to miss the last tram home. Mr. Prohack, without thinking, said that he would see her home in his taxi, which had been ruthlessly ticking his fortune away for much more than an hour.
"Kiss mother for me," said Sissie, "and tell her that she's a horrid old thing and I shall come along and give her a piece of my mind one of these days." And she gave him the kiss for her mother.
And as she kissed him, Mr. Prohack was very proud of his daughter—so efficient, so sound, so straight, so graceful.
"She's all right, anyway," he reflected. And yet she could be ecstatic in the arms of that perfect ass! And in the taxi: "Fancy me seeing home this dancing-mistress!" Eliza lived at Brook Green. She was very elegant, and quite unexceptionable until she opened her mouth. She related to him how her mother, who had once been a premier sujet in the Covent Garden ballet, was helpless from sciatica. But she related this picturesque and pride-causing detail in a manner very insipid, naïve, and even vulgar, (After all there was a difference between First Division and Second Division in the Civil Service!) She was boring him terribly before they reached Brook Green. She took leave with a deportment correct but acquired at an age too late. Still, he had liked to see her home in the taxi. She was young, and she was an object pleasing to the eye. He realised that he was not accustomed to the propinquity of young women. What would his cronies at the Club say to the escapade?... Odd, excessively odd, that the girl should be Sissie's partner, in a business enterprise of so odd a character!... The next thing was to meet Eve after the escapade. Should he keep to the defensive, or should he lead off with an attack apropos of the Eagle car?