Uncertain whether the impression that Prosper Profond was dangerous
should be traced to his attempt to give Val the Mayfly filly; to a
remark of Fleur's: "He's like the hosts of Midian--he prowls and prowls
around"; to his preposterous inquiry of Jack Cardigan: "What's the use
of keepin' fit?" or, more simply, to the fact that he was a foreigner,
or alien as it was now called. Certain, that Annette was looking
particularly handsome, and that Soames--had sold him a Gauguin and then
torn up the cheque, so that Monsieur Profond himself had said: "I didn't
get that small picture I bought from Mr. Forsyde."
However suspiciously regarded, he still frequented Winifred's evergreen
little house in Green Street, with a good-natured obtuseness which no
one mistook for naivete, a word hardly applicable to Monsieur Prosper
Profond. Winifred still found him "amusing," and would write him little
notes saying: "Come and have a 'jolly' with us"--it was breath of life
to her to keep up with the phrases of the day.
The mystery, with which all felt him to be surrounded, was due to his
having done, seen, heard, and known everything, and found nothing
in it--which was unnatural. The English type of disillusionment was
familiar enough to Winifred, who had always moved in fashionable
circles. It gave a certain cachet or distinction, so that one got
something out of it. But to see nothing in anything, not as a pose, but
because there was nothing in anything, was not English; and that which
was not English one could not help secretly feeling dangerous, if not
precisely bad form. It was like having the mood which the War had left,
seated--dark, heavy, smiling, indifferent--in your Empire chair; it
was like listening to that mood talking through thick pink lips above
a little diabolic beard. It was, as Jack Cardigan expressed it--for the
English character at large--"a bit too thick"--for if nothing was really
worth getting excited about, there were always games, and one could
make it so! Even Winifred, ever a Forsyte at heart, felt that there
was nothing to be had out of such a mood of disillusionment, so that it
really ought not to be there. Monsieur Profond, in fact, made the mood
too plain in a country which decently veiled such realities.
When Fleur, after her hurried return from Robin Hill, came down to
dinner that evening, the mood was standing at the window of Winifred's
little drawing-room, looking out into Green Street, with an air of
seeing nothing in it. And Fleur gazed promptly into the fireplace with
an air of seeing a fire which was not there.