"Indeed!"
"The sweeps, sir."
"I beg your pardon!" said the Prophet.
"I said--the sweeps."
"I heard you--well?"
"Being the only people that were not, in the whole road, made for loneliness, sir."
The Prophet was entirely _bouleverse_.
"I"m afraid I"m very stupid, but really I--" he began.
"Is it possible that you live in London, sir, and are not aware that Susan Road lies in the most sought-after portion of the sweeps"
quarter?" said Malkiel, with pitying amazement.
The Prophet blushed with shame.
"I beg your pardon. Of course--I understand. Pray go on."
"It made for loneliness, sir."
"Naturally."
"Their hours were not our hours. And then the professional colour!
Madame said it was like living among the Sandwich Islanders. And so, to an extent, it was. My father had left a very tidy bit of money--a very tidy bit indeed, and we resolved to move. But where? That was the problem. For I was not as other men. I could not live like them--in the Berkeley Square."
He smiled with mournful superiority and continued,--
"At least I thought so then, and have done till to-day. Prophets--so my father believed, and so Madame--must be connected with the suburbs or with outlying districts. They must not, indeed they cannot, be properly prophetic within the radius. A central atmosphere would reduce them to the level of the conjuror or the muscular suggestionist. Malkiel the First, my father, was born himself in Peckham, and met my mother when coming through the rye."
He brushed aside a tear that flowed at this almost rustic recollection, and continued,--
"Yet Madame was wishful, and I was wishful too, that the children--if we had any--should not grow up Eastern. It was a natural and a beautiful desire, sir, was it not?"
"Oh, very," replied the Prophet, considerably confused.
"The habits and manners of the East, you see, sir, are not always in strict accordance with propriety. Are they?"
Before the Prophet had time to realise that this question was merely rhetorical, he began,--
"From what Professor Seligman says in his _The Inner History of Baghdad_, I feel sure--"
"Nor are the customs of the East quite what many a clergyman would approve of," continued Malkiel. "Yet even this was not what weighed most with Madame."
"What was it then?" inquired the Prophet, deeply interested.
"Sir, it was the Eastern language."
"Ah!"
"Could we let our children learn to speak it? Could we bear to launch them in life, handicapped, weighed down by such a tongue? Could we do this?"
Again the Prophet mistook the nature of the question, and was led to reply,--
"Certainly English children speaking only Arabic might well be at some loss in ordinary conver--"
"We could not, sir. It was impossible. So we resolved to go to the north of London and to avoid Whitechapel at whatever cost."
"Whitechapel!" almost cried the Prophet.
"This determination it was, sir, that eventually led our steps to the borders of the River Mouse."
"Oh, really!"
"You know it, sir?"
"Not personally."
"But by repute, of course?"
"No doubt, no doubt," stammered the Prophet, who had in fact never before heard of this celebrated flood.
"That poor governess, sir, last August--you recollect?"
"Ah, indeed!" murmured the Prophet, a trifle incoherently.
"And then the mad undertaker in the autumn," continued Malkiel, with conscious pride; "he floated past our very door."
"Did he really?"
"Singing his swan song, no doubt, poor feller, as Madame said after she read about it in the paper. There were the grocer"s twins as well, just lately. But they will be fresh in your memory."
Before the Prophet had time to state whether this was so or not Malkiel proceeded,--
"Well, sir, as soon as Madame and I had come to the Mouse we resolved that we could do no better than that. It was salubrious, it was retired, and it was N."
"You said--?"
"N., sir."
"But what is en?"
"Sir?"
The Prophet had grown very red, but he was seized by the desperation that occasionally attacks ignorance, and renders it, for a moment, determinedly explicit.