Читать книгу The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes - Arnold Bennett - Страница 8

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The occupants of the balloon could see everything. They saw the debarcation from the steamers; they saw the unending crowd of doll-like persons thrown up out of the ground by the new Tube station at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge; they saw the heavy persistent stream of vehicles and pedestrians over the bridge; they saw the trains approaching Barnes on the South-Western Railway; they saw the struggles for admittance at all the gates of the City; they even saw flocks of people streaming Cityward along the Barnes High Street and the Lower Richmond Road. It was not for nothing that advertisements of the City of Pleasure had filled one solid page of every daily paper in London, and many in the provinces, for a week past. Visitors were now entering the city at the rate of seventy thousand an hour, at a shilling a head.

There was a gentle tug beneath the car. The thousand feet of rope had been paid out, and the balloon hung motionless.

Then a faint noise, something between the crackling of musketry and the surge of waves on a pebbly beach, ascended from the city.

“They’re cheering,” said Josephus Ilam. “What for?”

“Cheering us, of course,” answered Carpentaria excitedly. “Isn’t it immense?”

“Immense?” said Ilam heavily. “It’s hot. What did you want to show me up here?”

“That!” exclaimed Carpentaria, pointing below to the city with a superb gesture. “And that!” he added passionately, pointing with another gesture to the whole of London, which lay spread out with all its towers and steeples and its blanket of smoke, tremendous and interminable to the east. “That is our prey,” he said, “our food.”

And he began to sing the Toreador song from “Carmen,” exultantly launching the notes into the sky.

“Mr. Carpentaria,” said Josephus Ilam, with unexpected bitterness, “is this your idea of a joke? Bringing me up here to see London and our show, as if I didn’t know London and our show like my pocket!”

Ilam’s concealed, hatred of Carpentaria, which had been slowly growing for more than a year, as a fire spreads secretly in the hold of a ship, seemed to spurt out a swift tongue of flame in the acrimony of his tone. Carpentaria was startled. Even then, in a sudden flash of illumination, he grasped to a certain extent the import of Ilam’s attitude towards him, but he did not grasp it fully. How should he?

“Why,” he said to himself, “I believe the old johnny dislikes mel What on earth for?” He could not understand all Ilam’s reasons. “Pity!” he reflected further. “If the managers of a show like this can’t hit it off together, there may be trouble.”

In which supposition he was infinitely more right than he imagined.

He balanced himself lightly on the edge of the car, his left leg dangling, and seized one of the field-glasses which hung secured by thin steel chains round the inside of the wicker parapet, and putting it to his eyes, he gazed down at the Oriental Gardens. He must have seen something there that profoundly interested him, for the glasses remained glued to his eyes for a long time.

“I repeat,” said Ilam firmly, standing up, “is this your idea of a joke?”

He was close to Carpentaria, and his glance was vicious.

“My friend,” murmured Carpentaria, dropping the glasses. “What’s the matter with you is that you aren’t an artist, not a bit of one. You are an excellent fellow, with a splendid head for figures, and I respect you enormously, but you haven’t the artistic sense. If you had you would share the thrill which I feel as I survey our creation and that London over there. You would appreciate why I brought you up here.”

“I’m a business man—a plain business man, that’s what I am,” said Ilam. “I’ve never pretended to be an artist, and I don’t want to be an artist. Let me tell you that I ought to be in the advertisement department, and not canoodling my time away up here, Mr. Carpentaria.”

“My dear sir,” said Carpentaria hastily, “accept my apologies. Let us descend at once.”

“And while I’m about it,” pursued Ilam unheedingly—his irritation was like a stone rolling down a hill—“while I’m about it, I’ll point out that your objection to having advertisements on the walls of the restaurants is fatuous.”

“But, my dear Ilam,” Carpentaria protested, “people don’t care to have to read advertisements while they’re at their meals. It puts them off. For instance, to have it dinned into you that G. H. Mumm is the only champagne worth drinking when you happen to be drinking Heidsieck, or to have Wall’s sausages thrust down your throat while you are toying with an ice-cream—people don’t like it. We must think of our patrons. And, besides, it’s so inarti——”

“Rubbish!” said Ilam. “One way and another these ads. would be worth a hundred’ a week to us.”

“Well, and what’s a hundred a week?”

“It’s the interest on a hundred and twenty thousand pounds,” Ilam replied vivaciously. “And there’s another thing. It would be much better if you employed more time in inspection instead of rehearsing and conducting your precious band. Any fool can conduct a band. Give me a stick and I’d do it myself. But inspection———”

“My precious band!” stammered Carpentaria, aghast.

His very soul was laid low; and considering that Carpentaria’s Band had been famous in the capitals of two continents for twelve years at least, it was not surprising that his soul should be laid low by this terrible phrase.

“Yes,” said Ilam, “I’ve had enough of it.” His shoulder touched Carpentaria’s, and his eyes—little, like a pig’s—shot arrows of light. “Supposing I shoved you over? I should have the concern to myself then, and no foolish interference.”

He twisted his face into a grim laugh.

“You have a sense of humour, after all, Ilam,” responded gaily the man on the edge of the car, fingering his long red moustache, and he, too, laughed, but he got down from his perch.

“I’d just like you to comprehend——” Ilam began again.

But at that instant a head appeared above the edge of the central aperture of the car, and Ilam stopped.

It was the head of the young man in spectacles—gold-rimmed spectacles.

“I’m Smithers, of the Morning Herald,” said the young man brightly and calmly, “and I took this opportunity of seeing you privately. Your men objected when I got into the parachute attachment, but you told ’em to let go, and so they let go. I’ve had some difficulty in climbing up here off the parachute bar. Dangerous, rather. However, I’ve done it. I dare say you heard the crowd cheering.”

“So it was him they were cheering,” muttered Ilam, and then looked at Carpentaria.

Ilam was not a genius in the art of conversation. He could only say what he meant, and when the running of the City of Pleasure demanded the art of conversation he relied on Carpentaria, even if he was furious with him.

“What’s the game?” asked Carpentaria.

“Well,” said Smithers politely, “don’t you think I deserve an interview?”

“You know we have absolutely declined all interviews.”

“Yes, that’s why the Herald wants one so badly; that’s why I’m dangling a thousand feet above my grave.”

Carpentaria and Ilam exchanged glances. Each read the thought of the other—that the spectacled Smithers might have overheard their conversation, and should therefore be handled with care, this side up. “Leave it to me,” said the eyes of Carpentaria to the eyes of Ilam.

“Mr. Smithers, of the Herald”—Carpentaria blossomed into the flowers of speech—“we heartily applaud your courage and your devotion to duty in a profession full of perils, but you are trespassing.”

“Excuse me, I’m not,” said Smithers. “You can only trespass on land and water, and this isn’t a salmon river or a forbidden footpath. Besides, I’ve got my press season-ticket. Come now, talk to me.”

“We are talking to you.”

“I mean, answer my questions, for the benefit of humanity. I’m the father of a family with two penniless aunts, and the Herald will probably sack me if I fail in this interview. Think of that.”

“I prefer not to think of it,” said Carpentaria. “However, we will answer any reasonable questions you care to put to us, on one condition.”

“Name it,” snapped Smithers.

“I will name it afterwards,” said Carpentaria, looking at Ilam.

“All right,” sighed Smithers, “I agree, whatever it is.”

“You look like an honourable man. I shall trust you,” Carpentaria remarked.

“Journalists are always honourable,” said Smithers. “It is their employers who sometimes—however, that’s neither here nor there. You may trust me. Now tell me. Why this objection to interviews? That’s what’s puzzling the public. You’re a business concern, aren’t you?”

“That’s just the reason,” said Carpentaria. “We aren’t a star-actor or a bogus company. We’re above interviews, we are. Do you catch Smith and Son, or Cook’s, or the North-Western Railway, or Mrs. Humphry Ward having themselves interviewed?”

“Not much,” ejaculated Ilam glumly.

“People who refuse to be interviewed have a status that other people can never have. Our business is our business. When we want the public to know anything, we take a page in the Herald, say, and pay two hundred and fifty pounds for it, and inform the public exactly what we do want ’em to know, in our own words. We do not require the assistance of interviewers. There’s the whole secret. What next?”

“That seems pretty straight,” Smithers agreed. “Another thing. Why have you gone and called this concern the City of Pleasure?”

“Because it is the City of Pleasure,” growled Ilam.

“Yes. But it seems rather a fancy name, doesn’t it?—rather too poetical, highfalutin?”

“That’s merely because you journalists never have any imagination,” Carpentaria explained. “You aren’t used to this name yet. It was you journalists who cried out that the Crystal Palace was a too poetical and highfalutin name for that glass wigwam over there”—and he pointed to the twin towers of Sydenham in the distance—“but you’ve got used to it, and you admit now that it is the Crystal Palace and couldn’t be anything else.”

Smithers laughed.

“Good!” said he. “All that’s nothing. Let me come to the core of the apple. Do you expect this thing to pay? Do you really mean it to pay, or is it only a millionaire’s lark? You know all the experts are saying it can’t pay.”

“Can’t it?” ejaculated Ilam.

“We shall take fifteen thousand pounds at the gates to-day,” said Carpentaria. “The highest attendance in any one day at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 was six hundred thousand. Do you imagine we can’t equal that? We shall surpass it, sir. Wait for our August fêtes. Wait for our Congress of Trade Unions in September, and you will see! The average total attendance at the last three Paris exhibitions has been forty-five millions. We hope to reach fifty millions. But suppose we only reach forty millions. That means two million pounds in gates alone; and let me remind you that the minor activities of this show are self-supporting. Why, the Chicago Exhibition made a profit of nearly a million and a half dollars. Do you suppose we can’t beat that, with a city of six million people at our doors, and the millions of Lancashire and Yorkshire within four hours of us?”

“But Chicago was State-aided,” Mr. Smithers ventured.

“State-aided!” cried Ilam. “Chicago was the worst-managed show in the history of shows, except St. Louis. If the State came to me I should—I should——”

“Offer it a penny to go away and play in the next street.” Carpentaria finished his sentence for him.

“You interest me extremely,” said the journalist. “And now, as to the number of your employés.”

He chuckled to himself with glee at the splendid interview he was getting out of Carpentaria and Ilam as they obligingly responded to his queries. It was Ilam who at last revolted, and insisted that he must descend.

“Now for my condition,” said Carpentaria.

“Let’s have it,” said the journalist.

“You asked us to talk to you and we have talked to you. The condition is that you regard all you have heard up here as strictly confidential—mind, all! You tell no one; you print nothing..Remember, you are an honourable man.”

“But this is farcical,” Smithers expostulated.

“Not at all,” said Carpentaria sweetly. “Do you imagine that because you have an inordinate amount of cheek, a family and two penniless aunts, we are going to break the habits of a life-time? For myself, I have never been interviewed.”

“Is this your last word?” the journalist demanded.

“It is,” said Carpentaria.

“Very well,” said the journalist, and his head disappeared.

“Let us descend,” said Ilam, savagely pleased. And he waved the descent flag.

“We shan’t descend just yet,” the journalist informed them, popping up his head again.

“And pray, why not?”

“Because I’ve cut the rope.”

Carpentaria, always calm when art was not concerned, tore a fragment of paper from an envelope in his pocket and threw it out of the car. It sank away rapidly from the balloon. Moreover, it was evident, even to the eye, that their distance from the earth was vastly increasing.

“I withdraw my promise now this moment,” said the journalist, climbing carefully into the car. “Everything that you say henceforward will be printed. We shall have quite an exciting trip. We may even get to France. Anyhow, I shall have a clinking column for Monday’s Herald. You evidently hadn’t quite appreciated what the new journalism is.”

Then there was silence in the mounting balloon.

Ilam bent his malevolent eyes longingly upon the disappearing scene below. The glory of the sunshine was nothing to him. He wanted to be in the advertisement department, arranging future contracts for spaces on the programmes. He reflected that it was another of the mad caprices of Carpentaria that had got him into this grotesque scrape. And he was so angry that he forgot even to think of the danger to which he was exposed.

“So here we are!” said the journalist. “And you can’t do anything!”