Mr. Prohack by Arnold Bennett
page 37 of 489 (07%)
page 37 of 489 (07%)
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"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._ Mr. Prohack had uncomfortable qualms of apprehension. For several minutes past he had been thinking: "Suppose there _is_ something up with that will!" He had little confidence in Mr. Softly Bishop. And now the aspect of the solicitors' office frightened him. It had happened to him, being a favourite trustee of his relations and friends, to visit the offices of some of the first legal firms in Lincoln's Inn Fields. You entered these lairs by a dirty door and a dirty corridor and another dirty door. You were interrogated by a shabby clerk who sat on a foul stool at a foul desk in a foul office. And finally after an interval in a cubby hole that could not boast even _The Anti-Vaccination Record_, you were driven along a dirtier passage into a dirtiest room whose windows were obscured by generations of filth, and in that room sat a spick and span lawyer of great name who was probably an ex-president of the Incorporated Law Society. The offices of Smathe and Smathe corresponded with alarming closeness to Mr. Prohack's idea of what a bucket-shop might be. Mr. Prohack had the gravest fears for his hundred thousand pounds. "This is the solicitor's office new style," said Bishop, who seemed to have an uncanny gift of reading thoughts. "Very big firm. |
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