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When the household day began and the familiar comfortable distant noises of domestic activity announced that the solar system was behaving much as usual in infinite and inconceivable space, he decided that he was too tired to be scientifically idle that day even though he had a trying-on appointment with Mr. Melchizidek.
Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr. Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them carrying pencil and paper, and Mr. Prohack removed, with assistance, his shabby coat and his waistcoat, and Mr. Melchizidek measured him in unexampled detail and precision, and the scribe, writing, intoned aloud all Mr. Prohack's dimensions. And all the time Mr.
Prohack perceived that he was only beginning to comprehend the wonder of existence. The adepts at the tailors', however, seemed to see nothing wonderful in the matter. They showed no surprise that he had written to make an appointment with a particular adept named Melchizidek, who had been casually mentioned weeks earlier by Charles as the one man in London who really comprehended waistcoats.
Melchizidek seemed to be similarly affected by the voice, so much so that the intimate of sovereigns unaffectedly hastened the business of enduing Mr. Prohack into the shameful waistcoat and coat, and then, with a gesture of apology, passed out of the cubicle, leaving Mr. Prohack with the attendant scribe. Mr. Prohack, pricked by a fearful curiosity, followed Mr.
Looking into his firm, confident eyes, Mr. Prohack realised, perhaps for the first time, that the fruit of his loins was no common boy. The mere fact that as an out-of-work ex-officer, precariously making a bit in motor-bicycle deals, he had dared to go to Melchizidek's firm for clothes, and that he was now daring to affront Melchizidek, this sole fact separated him from the ruck of sons.
Prohack that what he had told his family, and that what he had told Miss Winstock in the car, was strictly true and not the invention of his fancy namely that the appointment was genuinely of high importance. Mr. Melchizidek possessed the strange gift of condescending majestically to Mr. Prohack while licking his boots. He listened to Mr. Prohack as to an autocrat while giving Mr.
Melchizidek, and that this same Melchizidek, fawning and masterful, had seen monarchs in their shirt sleeves and spoken to princes with pins in his mouth, and made marks in white chalk between the shoulder-blades of grand-dukes; and that revolutions and cataclysms were nothing to Mr. Melchizidek. When Mr. Melchizidek had decided by hypnotic suggestion and magic power what Mr.
Melchizidek; and the voice was saying: "Oh! You're there, Melchizidek. Just come and look at this crease." Mr. Melchizidek, pained, moved forward. Three acolytes were already standing in shocked silence round about a young man who stretched forth one leg so that all might see. "I ask you," the young man proceeded, "is it an inch out or isn't it? And how many times have I tried these things on?
I'm a busy man, and here I have to waste my time coming here again and again to get a thing right that ought to have been right the first time. And you call yourselves the first tailors in Europe.... Correct me if I'm inaccurate in any of my statements." Mr. Melchizidek, who unlike an Englishman knew when he was beaten, said in a solemn bass: "When can I send for them, sir?"
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