Humorous stories; London (England) -- Fiction; Wealth -- Fiction
And he saw with the most sane and steady insight that the final duty of
a Government was to keep order. Change there must be, but let change
come gradually. Injustices must be remedied, naturally, but without any
upheaval! Yet in the club some of the cronies (and he among them), after
inveighing against profiteers and against the covetousness of trades
unions, had often held that "a good red revolution" was the only way of
knocking sense into the heads of these two classes.
The car got involved in a block of traffic near the Mansion House, and
rain began to fall. The two occupants of the car watched each other
surreptitiously, mutually suspicious, like dogs. Scraps of talk were
separated by long intervals. Mr. Prohack wondered what the deuce Softly
Bishop had done that Angmering should leave him a hundred thousand
pounds. He tried to feel grief for the tragic and untimely death of his
old friend Angmering, and failed. No doubt the failure was due to the
fact that he had not seen Angmering for so many years.
At last Mr. Prohack, his hands in his pockets, his legs stretched out,
his gaze uplifted, he said suddenly:
"I suppose it'll hold water?"
"What? The roof of the car?"
"No. The will."
Mr. Softly Bishop gave a short laugh, but made no other answer.
IV
The car halted finally before an immense new block of buildings, and the
inheritors floated up to the fifth floor in a padded lift manned by a
brilliantly-uniformed attendant. Mr. Prohack saw "Smathe and Smathe" in
gilt on a glass door. The enquiry office resembled the ante-room of a
restaurant, as the whole building resembled a fashionable hotel.
Everywhere was mosaic flooring.
"Mr. Percy Smathe?" demanded Bishop of a clerk whose head glittered in
the white radiance of a green-shaded lamp.
"I'll see, sir. Please step into the waiting-room." And he waved a
patronising negligent hand. "What name?" he added.
"Have you forgotten my name already?" Mr. Bishop retorted sharply.
"Bishop. Tell Mr. Percy Smathe I'm here. At once, please."
And he led Mr. Prohack to the waiting-room, which was a magnificent
apartment with stained glass windows, furnished in Chippendale similar
to, but much finer than, the furnishing of Mr. Prohack's own house. On
the table were newspapers and periodicals. Not _The Engineering Times_
of April in the previous year or a _Punch_ of the previous decade, and
_The Vaccination Record_; but such things as the current _Tatler, Times,
Economist_, and _La Vie Parisienne._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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