SUCCESS is a strong wine. It was running vividly in Dwala’s veins. Every least thing he did seemed to him fate-ordered and conclusive. Oh, the pride of it, the joy of it, the ease of it! The acclamations and the consciousness of right!
The new Civilisation was like a poem, the scheme of which has come whole and organic to the poet, and which germinates therefore without constraint into its natural, necessary verses. The right men and the right ideas fell of themselves into their places, like particles forming a system of crystals. Dwala had found the basic idea, which all this turbid mass had been so long awaiting. He created life and received it. That same life flowed into his fibres, from the movement of the multitude, which flows into the peasant-woman’s baby out of the dust gathered on the busy highway.
Lady Wyse, seeing the easy joyful motion of his limbs and hearing the deep vigour of his voice, put her presentiments away. Dwala himself looked back in wonder at that grey mood when the world had faded from him. He was like the traveller who stands in the garish whirl of the fair, wondering if this can be the place that looked so grim on Sunday. He was enjoying the strong rush of life which a kindly Heaven sends to the consumptive as consolation for their early death.
He had new friends about him now. The Glendovers, the Disturnals, and the rest of that crew had vanished into the Unknown; they were growing turnips, shooting partridges, or riding on motor-ears somewhere in the Outer Darkness. Hartopp and Prosser were still there; Joey had run away to Seven Dials; Huxtable had packed his boxes, and stayed on in a condition of provisional irresolution.
On Dwala’s third floor lived an ascetic pensioner—a certain Mr. Bone, an American, a traveller in the East, a friend of Lady Wyse—connected by some mystery of familiarity with Dwala’s past. Rumour had it that he was an adventurer who had been Dwala’s Prime Minister in his days of sovereignty.
Dwala’s palace, in fact, was fast turning into a monastery, where the Abbot, with his little cell by the hall-door, was the least luxuriously housed of all.
Prosser, as I said, was still there, but he was no longer there as valet. The acceptance of such personal service was inconsistent with the Prince’s New Humanity, and Prosser was quite incapable of performing his duties properly. For some time he had contented himself with a life of ease in his own room. But his politics also had changed: he did not see why he should be worse off than Hartopp, and, by force of gradual asking, acquired the whole of the second floor, over Hartopp, for his portion. He had everything he could think of wanting in his rooms; but even that did not content him. He had thought that wealth was all he needed to make him happy in his sober intervals; but soon found out that he was mistaken. His career had given him a longing for other people’s property; things lost their interest for him once they became his own. He craved for the excitements of the past. Scissors, and ashtrays, and other glittering things got a way of disappearing wherever he went about the house. One night Dwala was aroused by the screaming of a police whistle from one of Hartopp’s windows over him, and going up he found the Fence sitting on Prosser’s chest in the window-seat, and blowing for all he was worth. A broken cupboard and a trailing jemmy explained the situation.
‘All right, guvnor, I’ll go quietly,’ said Prosser, in a squeezed husky voice; ‘I’m nabbed right enough this time.’ All the household crowded in at the doorway with scared faces; policemen appeared, and the alarm ended with the lights being turned up and everybody sitting down together, policemen and all, to a scratch supper in the dining-room, and laughing uproariously, as if something very funny had occurred.
The best of Prosser was that he never made any unpleasantness about being arrested. He would surrender at discretion to the housemaid or the boot boy, and offer to ‘go quietly.’ The policemen outside entered into the joke of it, and were ready on the doorstep to come in for their supper and half-crown whenever the episcopal butler ran out of a night—as he always did—to fetch them. The American was the only one who missed the fun of the thing; he swore that if he found anyone prowling about his rooms he would punch his head and hand him over, bag and baggage, to the police.
Dwala himself was already tired of the joke, when the butler—rather dishevelled—came in to the picture-gallery where he was pacing up and down, one afternoon, with a sheaf of spoons in one hand and the crestfallen Prosser in the other.
‘Why don’t you steal something big and have done with it?’ Dwala said, when he and the ex-valet were left alone. ‘One of these pictures, for instance; they’re very valuable some of them, I know. Now here’s a tremendously fine thing, I’m told. Who’s it by? The name’s written on the frame.’
‘Rubens, sir.’
‘Now you take that, Prosser, some night. I don’t want it a bit, I assure you. It’s worth something like fifteen thousand pounds, I’m told.’
Prosser returned it after a couple of days.
‘I can’t sleep with it in the room, I can’t, sir. When I shuts my eyes I seems to see all them ladies rollin’ up and down and every way till I’m fairly giddy. But I promise you, sir, I won’t go in no more for little thievin’s, I’ll keep my eyes open for something big.’