And off he went by taxi to his club. The visit, he reflected, would serve the secondary purpose of an inconspicuous re-entry into club-life after absence from it.
He thought:
"They may have had an accident with that car. One day she's certain to have an accident anyhow,—she's so impulsive."
Of course Mr. Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F. just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to observe that F.F. had evidently heard neither of his illness nor of his inheritance.
Mr. Fieldfare was a spare, middle-aged man, of apparently austere habit; short, shabby; a beautiful, resigned face, burning eyes, and a soft voice. He was weighed down, and had been weighed down for thirty years, by a sense of the threatened immediate collapse of society—of all societies, and by the solemn illusion that he more clearly than anybody else understood the fearful trend of events.
Mr. Prohack had once, during the war, remarked on seeing F.F. glance at the tape in the Club: "Look at F.F. afraid lest there may be some good news." Nevertheless he liked F.F.
As editor of a financial weekly, F.F. naturally had to keep well under control his world-sadness. High finance cannot prosper in an atmosphere of world-sadness, and hates it. F.F. ought never to have become the editor of a financial weekly; but he happened to be an expert statistician, an honest man and a courageous man, and an expert in the pathology of stock-markets, and on this score his proprietors excused the slight traces of world-sadness occasionally to be found in the paper. He might have left his post and obtained another; but to be forced by fate to be editor of a financial weekly was F.F.'s chief grievance in life, and he loved a good grievance beyond everything.
"But, my dear fellow," said F.F. with his melancholy ardent glance, when Mr. Prohack had replied suitably to his opening question. "I'd no idea you'd been unwell. I hope it isn't what's called a breakdown."
"Oh, no!" Mr. Prohack laughed nervously. "But you know what doctors are. A little rest has been prescribed."
F.F. gazed at him softly compassionate, as if to indicate that nothing but trouble could be expected under the present political regime. They examined the tape together.