While Charlie went to the mantelpiece Mr. Prohack secreted an apple for his starving wife.

“Machin,” said he to the incoming house-parlourmaid, “see if you can find some port.”

Charlie raised his fatigued eyebrows.

“Yes, sir,” said the house-parlourmaid, vivaciously, and whisked away her skirts, which seemed to remark: 

“You’re quite right to have port.  I feel very sorry for you two attractive gentlemen taking a poor dinner all alone.”

Charlie drank his port in silence and Mr. Prohack watched him.

* * * * *

II

Mr. Prohack’s son was, in some respects, a great mystery to him.  He could not understand, for instance, how his own offspring could be so unresponsive to the attractions of the things of the mind, and so interested in mere machinery and the methods of moving a living or a lifeless object from one spot on the earth’s surface to another.  Mr. Prohack admitted the necessity of machinery, but an automobile had for him the same status as a child’s scooter and no higher.  It was an ingenious device for locomotion.  And there for him the matter ended.  On the other hand, Mr. Prohack sympathised with and comprehended his son’s general attitude towards life.  Charlie had gone to war from Cambridge at the age of nineteen.  He went a boy, and returned a grave man.  He went thoughtless and light-hearted, and returned full of magnificent and austere ideals.  Six months of England had destroyed these ideals in him.  He had expected to help in the common task of making heaven in about a fortnight.  In the war he had learnt much about the possibilities of human nature, but scarcely anything about its limitations.  His father tried to warn him, but of course failed.  Charlie grew resentful, then cynical.  He saw in England nothing but futility, injustice and ingratitude.  He refused to resume Cambridge, and was bitterly sarcastic about the generosity of a nation which, through its War Office, was ready to pay to studious warriors anxious to make up University terms lost in a holy war decidedly less than it paid to its street-sweepers.  Having escaped from death, the aforesaid warriors were granted the right to starve their bodies while improving their minds.  He might have had sure situations in vast corporations.  He declined them.  He spat on them.  He called them “graves.”  What he wanted was an opportunity to fulfil himself.  He could not get it, and his father could not get it form him.  While searching for it, he frequently met warriors covered with ribbons but lacking food and shelter not only for themselves but for their women and children.  All this, human nature being what it is, was inevitable, but his father could not convincingly tell him so.  All that Mr. Prohack could effectively do Mr. Prohack did,—­namely, provide the saviour of Britain with food and shelter.  Charlie was restlessly and dangerously waiting for his opportunity.  But he had not developed into a revolutionist, nor a communist, nor anything of the sort.  Oh, no!  Quite the reverse.  He meditated a different revenge on society.