I
The very next day Mr. Prohack had a plutocratic1 mood of overbearingness, which led to a sudden change in his location—the same being transferred to Frinton-on-Sea. The mood was brought about by a visit to the City, at the summons of Paul Spinner; and the visit included conversations not only with Paul, but with Smathe and Smathe, the solicitors2, and with a firm of stockbrokers3. Paul handed over to his crony saleable securities, chiefly in the shape of scrip of the greatest oil-combine and its subsidiaries, for a vast amount, and advised Mr. Prohack to hold on to them, as, owing to the present depression due to the imminence4 of a great strike, they were likely to be "marked higher" before Mr. Prohack was much older. Mr. Prohack declined the advice, and he also declined the advice of solicitors and stockbrokers, who were both full of wisdom and of devices for increasing capital values. What these firms knew about the future, and about the consequences of causes and about "the psychology5 of the markets" astounded6 the simple Terror of the departments; and it was probably unanswerable. But, being full of riches, Mr. Prohack did not trouble to answer it; he merely swept it away with a tyrannical and impatient gesture, which gesture somehow mysteriously established him at once as a great authority on the art of investment.
"Now listen to me," said he imperiously, and the manipulators of shares listened, recalling to themselves that Mr. Prohack had been a Treasury7 official for over twenty years and must therefore be worth hearing—although the manipulators commonly spent many hours a week in asserting, in the press and elsewhere, that Treasury officials comprehended naught8 of finance. "Now listen to me. I don't care a hang about my capital. It may decrease or increase, and I shan't care. All I care for is my interest. I want to be absolutely sure that my interest will tumble automatically into my bank on fixed9 dates. No other consideration touches me. I'm not a gambler. I'm not a usurer. Industrial development leaves me cold, and if I should ever feel any desire to knit the Empire closer together I'll try to do it without making a profit out of it. At the moment all I'm after is certain, sure, fixed interest. Hence—Government securities, British Government or Colonial! Britain is of course rotten to the core, always was, always will be. Still, I'll take my chances. I'm infernally insular10 where investment is concerned. There's one thing to be said about the British Empire—you do know where you are in it. And I don't mind some municipal stocks. I even want some. I can conceive the smash-up of the British Empire, but I cannot conceive Manchester defaulting in its interest payments. Can you?" And he looked round and paused for a reply, and no reply came. Nobody dared to boast himself capable of conceiving Manchester's default.
Towards the end of the arduous11 day Mr. Prohack departed from the City, leaving behind him an immense reputation for financial sagacity, and a scheme of investment under which he could utterly12 count upon a modest regular income of £17,000 per annum. He was sacrificing over £5,000 per annum in order to be free from an investor's anxieties, and he reckoned that his peace of mind was cheap at a hundred pounds a week. This detail alone shows to what an extent the man's taste for costly14 luxuries had grown.
Naturally he arrived home swollen15. Now it happened that Eve also, by reason of her triumph in regard to the house in Manchester Square, had swelled16 head. A conflict of individualities occurred. A trifle, even a quite pleasant trifle! Nothing that the servants might not hear with advantage. But before you could say 'knife' Mr. Prohack had said that he would go away for a holiday and abandon Eve to manage the removal to Manchester Square how she chose, and Eve had leapt on to the challenge and it was settled that Mr. Prohack should go to Frinton-on-Sea.
Eve selected Frinton-on-Sea for him because Dr. Veiga had recommended it for herself. She had a broad notion of marriage as a commonwealth17. She loved to take Mr. Prohack's medicines, and she was now insisting on his taking her watering-places. Mr. Prohack said that the threatened great strike might prevent his journey. Pooh! She laughed at such fears. She drove him herself to Liverpool Street.
"You may see your friend Lady Massulam," said she, as the car entered the precincts of the station. (Once again he was struck by the words 'your friend' prefixed to Lady Massulam; but he offered no comment on them.)
"Why Lady Massulam?" he asked.
"Didn't you know she's got a house at Frinton?" replied Mrs. Prohack. "Everybody has in these days. It's the thing."
She didn't see him into the train, because she was in a hurry about butlers. Mr. Prohack was cast loose in the booking-hall and had a fine novel sensation of freedom.
II
Never since marriage had he taken a holiday alone—never desired to do so. He felt himself to be on the edge of romance. Frinton, for example, presented itself as a city of romance. He knew it not, knew scarcely any English seaside, having always managed to spend his holidays abroad; but Frinton must, he was convinced, be strangely romantic. The train thither19 had an aspect which strengthened this conviction. It consisted largely of first-class coaches, and in the window of nearly every first-class compartment20 and saloon was exhibited a notice: "This compartment (or saloon) is reserved for members of the North Essex Season-Ticket-Holders Association." Mr. Prohack, being still somewhat swollen, decided21 that he was a member of the North Essex Season-Ticket-Holders Association and acted accordingly. Otherwise he might never have reached Frinton.
He found himself in a sort of club, about sixty feet by six, where everybody knew everybody except Mr. Prohack, and where cards and other games, tea and other drinks, tobacco and other weeds, were being played and consumed in an atmosphere of the utmost conviviality22. Mr. Prohack was ignored, but he was not objected to. His fellow-travellers regarded him cautiously, as a new chum. The head attendant and dispenser was very affable, as to a promising23 neophyte24. Only the ticket-inspector25 singled him out from all the rest by stopping in front of him.
"My last hour has come," thought Mr. Prohack as he produced his miserable26 white return-ticket.
All stared; the inspector stared; but nothing happened. Mr. Prohack had a sense of reprieve27, and also of having been baptised or inducted into a secret society. He listened heartily28 to forty conversations about physical diversions and luxuries and about the malignant29 and fatuous30 wrong-headedness of men who went on strike, and about the approaching catastrophic end of all things.
Meanwhile, at any rate in the coach, the fabric31 of society seemed to be holding together fairly well. Before the train was half-way to Frinton Mr. Prohack judged—and rightly—that he was already there. The fact was that he had been there ever since entering the saloon. After two hours the train, greatly diminished in length, came to rest in the midst of a dark flatness, and the entire population of the coach vanished out of it in the twinkling of an eye, and Mr. Prohack saw the name 'Frinton' on a flickering32 oil-lamp, and realised that he was at the gates of the most fashionable resort in England, a spot where even the ozone33 was exclusive. The station staff marvelled34 at him because he didn't know where the Majestic35 Hotel was and because he asked without notice for a taxi, fly, omnibus or anything on wheels. All the other passengers had disappeared. The exclusive ozone was heavy with exciting romance for Mr. Prohack as the station staff considered his unique and incomprehensible case. Then a tiny omnibus materialised out of the night.
"Is this the Majestic bus?" Mr. Prohack enquired36 of the driver.
"Well, it is if you like, sir," the driver answered.
Mr. Prohack did like....
The Majestic was large and prim38, resembling a Swiss hotel in its furniture, the language and composition of the menu, the dialect of the waiters; but it was about fifteen degrees colder than the highest hotel in Switzerland. The dining-room was shaded with rose-shaded lamps and it susurrated with the polite whisperings of elegant couples and trios, and the entremet was cabinet pudding: a fine display considering the depth of winter and of the off-season.
Mr. Prohack went off after dinner for a sharp walk in the east wind. Solitude39! Blackness! Night! East wind in the bushes of gardens that shielded the façades of large houses! Not a soul! Not a policeman! He descended40 precariously41 to the vast, smooth beach. The sound of the sea! Romance! Mr. Prohack seemed to walk for miles, like Ozymandias, on the lone13 and level sands. Then he fancied he descried42 a moving object. He was not mistaken. It approached him. It became a man and a woman. It became a man and a young woman arm-in-arm and soul-in-soul. And there was nothing but the locked couple, and the sound of the invisible, immeasurable sea, and the east wind, and Mr. Prohack. Romance thrilled through Mr. Prohack's spine43.
"So I said to him," the man was saying to the young woman as the pair passed Mr. Prohack, "I said to him 'I could do with a pint44 o' that,' I said."
III
The next morning Mr. Prohack rose with alacrity45 from a hard bed, and was greeted in the hall by the manager of the hotel, an enormous, middle-aged18, sun-burnt, jolly person in flannels47 and an incandescent48 blazer, who asked him about his interests in golf and hard-court tennis. Mr. Prohack, steeped as he felt himself to be in strange romance, was prepared to be interested in these games, but the self-protective instinct warned him that since these games could not be played alone they would, if he indulged in them, bring him into contact with people who might prove tedious. He therefore changed the conversation and asked whether he could have strawberry jam to his breakfast. The manager's face instantly changed, hardening to severity. Was Mr. Prohack eccentric? Did he desire to disturb the serene50 habits of the hotel? The manager promised to see. He did see, and announced that he was 'afraid' that Mr. Prohack could not have strawberry jam to his breakfast. And Mr. Prohack said to himself: "What would my son Charles have done?" During a solitary51 breakfast (with blackberry jam) in the huge dining-room, Mr. Prohack decided that Charles would have approached the manager differently.
After breakfast he saw the manager again, and he did not enquire37 from the manager whether there was any chance of hiring a motor-car. He said briefly52:
"I want to hire a car, please. It must be round here in half an hour, sharp."
"I will attend to the matter myself," said the manager humbly53.
The car kept the rendezvous54, and Mr. Prohack inspected Frinton from the car. He admired the magnificent reserve of Frinton, which was the most English place he had ever seen. The houses gave nothing away; the shivering shopping ladies in the streets gave nothing away; and certainly the shops gave nothing away. The newspaper placards announced what seemed to be equivalent to the end of the existing social order; but Frinton apparently55 did not blench56 nor tremble; it went calmly and powerfully forward into the day (which was Saturday), relying upon the great British axiom: "To ignore is to destroy." It ignored the end of the existing social order, and lo! there was no end. Up and down various long and infinitely57 correct avenues of sheltered homes drove Mr. Prohack, and was everywhere baffled in his human desire to meet Frinton half-way. He stopped the car at the Post Office and telegraphed to his wife: "No strawberry jam in this city. Love. Arthur." The girl behind the counter said: "One and a penny, please," and looked hard at him. Five minutes later he returned to the Post Office and telegraphed to his wife: "Omitted to say in previous telegram tha............