Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 10
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“Ah! There’s Cradock,” said Evelyn. “He’s our buyer. I’ll introduce him to you. The little man there. The one that’s sticking a skewer into that lamb.”
Gracie recognised the man who had been waiting in the great hall of the hotel. Having stuck the skewer into the carcass, Jack pulled it out and put it to his nose. Then, while Evelyn and Gracie watched, he stuck a skewer into the next lamb, and finally left a skewer in each lamb: sign that they were his chosen.
“Chines and ends,” Gracie heard him say, as he scribbled in a notebook.
He saw Evelyn.
“Here we are, Cradock,” said Evelyn. “This is Miss Savott. Knows all about motor-racing. Now she wants to know all about Smithfield.”
Jack clasped her slim hand in his thick one.
“I do think your market is marvellous, Mr. Cradock!” Gracie greeted him, genuine enthusiasm in her emotional low voice. Her clasp tightened on the thick hand, and held it.
“Glad to meet you, miss.”
“It’s so big and so clean. I love this blue paint.”
“Glad to hear that, miss. There’s some of ’em would sooner have the old green ... a bit of it over there.” He pointed.
“That’s nice too. But I prefer the blue, myself.”
Jack was conquered at once, not by her views on blue and green paint, but by her honest manner, by her beauty, and by the warmth of her trifling, fragile, firm fingers. He thought, “Governor knows what’s what. Trust him!” And since the relations of men and women are essentially the same in all classes, and his ideas concerning them had been made robust and magnanimous by many contacts with meat-salesmen of terrific physique, he began privately to wish the governor well in whatever the governor might be about. Anyhow it was none of his business, and the governor could indeed be trusted, had nothing to learn.
“You see those lambs, sir,” he murmured. “I guarantee there isn’t ten lambs like them in all London to-day!”
Evelyn nodded. The carcasses were already lifted off their hooks. Gracie saw them put on a huge carving block, and watched a carver in bloody blue divide them with a long razor-knife and a saw. In a moment the operation was performed, and so delicately and elegantly that it had no repulsiveness. The carvers were finished surgeons for Gracie, not butchers.
“That’s got to be served for lunch at the hotel this morning,” said Jack to her. “We hang the beef for five or six days—used to hang it for twelve or fourteen. But you ladies and gentlemen alter your tastes, you see, miss, and we have to follow. You see all that calves’ liver there. Not so many years ago, I could buy as much as I wanted at sixpence a pound. Would you believe me, it costs me two shillings these days! All because them Harley Street doctors say it’s good for anæmia.” He turned to Evelyn: “That’s Charlie Jebson, governor. Next door.” He jerked his head.
“Let’s go and talk to him,” said Evelyn, easily.
Mr. Charles Jebson was a very tall man, with a good figure, and dandiacal in dress.
“This is my governor, Mr. Orcham, Charlie. And this is Miss Savott, come to see what we do up here. Mr. Charles Jebson.”
Charles became exceedingly deferential. He shook hands with Gracie like a young peer in swallow-tails determined to ingratiate himself with a chorus-girl. Gracie smiled to herself, thinking: “What a dance I could lead him!”
“You do get up early here, Mr. Jebson,” she said. “When do you sleep?”
“I don’t, miss,” he replied, smirking. “At least—well, three or four hours. Make it up Sundays. Perhaps you know the ‘Shaftesbury,’ in Shaftesbury Avenue. Express lunch and supper counter. That’s mine. They call me ‘the governor’ there, when I go in of a night to tackle the books and keep an eye on things. Not so much time for sleep, you’ll freely admit.” Gracie’s notion of him was enlarged. White coat before dawn. Restaurateur in the centre of theatre-land at supper-time! A romantic world!
“It’s all too marvellous!” she said admiringly.
Charlie showed pride. A procession of four laden porters charged blindly down the avenue, shouting. Gracie received a glancing blow on the shoulder. She spun round, laughing. Jack moved her paternally away to shelter. A nun, hands joined in front, eyes downcast, walked sedately along the avenue, a strange, exotic visitant from another sphere. The spectacle startled Gracie, shaking all her ideals, somehow shaming her.
“Why is she here?” she demanded of Jack with false casualness.
“I couldn’t say, miss, for sure. Little Sister of the Poor, or something. Come for what she can get. Food for orphans, I shouldn’t be surprised. They’re very generous in the Market.” He added discreetly, as Gracie made as if to return to Evelyn, “Governor’s got a bit of business with Mr. Jebson.”
“Oh yes.” And she asked him some questions about what she saw.
“Refrigerators,” he said. “Thirty years ago when I first came here there wasn’t an ice-box in the place.”
Gracie could overhear parts of the conversation between Charlie and Evelyn. Evelyn laughed faintly. Charlie laughed loudly. It went on.
“I hope we shall be able to continue to do business together, Mr. Jebson,” Evelyn said at length.
“It won’t be my fault if we don’t, sir,” Charlie deferentially replied.
“That’s good,” said Evelyn. “I know there’s no beef better than yours. I didn’t know you had a restaurant. I’ve often noticed the Shaftesbury. One night I shall come in. I’m rather interested in restaurants.” He laughed.
“Thank you, sir. It’ll be a great honour when you do.”
General handshaking, which left Charlie Jebson well satisfied with the scheme of the universe. The three proceeded along the avenue.
II
“That’ll be all right now, I think,” Gracie heard Evelyn murmur to Jack Cradock. And she recalled what Evelyn had said to her about an instinct for handling people. As it was extremely difficult to walk three abreast in the thronged avenues, Jack, now elated, walked ahead. But sometimes he lagged behind. Everybody knew him. Everybody addressed him as Jack. (The Smithfield world was as much a world of Christian names as Gracie’s own.) Nevertheless the affectionate familiarity towards Jack was masked by the respect due to a man who was incapable of being deceived as to the quality of a carcass, who represented the swellest hotel in London, who had a clerk, who spent an average of a hundred pounds sterling a day, and who would take nothing but the best.
Cradock stopped dead, in the rear.
“Hello, Jim. I want a hundred pounds of fat.”
“Two and four,” was the reply.
“That’s where you’re wrong. Two shillings.”
“And that’s where you’re wrong.”
“Two and two,” said Jack.
“Oh,” said Jim, with feigned disgust. “I’ll give it you for your birthday. I know how hard up you are.”
Jack scribbled in his book and strode after the waiting pair. But a heavy hand was laid on his shoulder.
“Hello, Jack. Not seen you lately. Had a fair holiday?”
“Yes,” said Cradock. “I have had a fair holiday. I’m not like some of you chaps. When I go for a holiday I take my wife.” He hurried on.
“Excuse me, miss,” he apologised to Gracie.
The trio arrived at a large fenced lift.
“Miss Savott might like to go down,” Evelyn suggested.
Cradock spoke to the guardian, and the chains were unfastened.
“If you’ll excuse me, governor. I’ll see you afterwards.” And to Gracie, with a grin: “I’ve got a bit to do, and time’s getting on. If I don’t keep two ton o’ meat in stock down at the Imperial Palace the governor would pass me a remark.” With a smile kindly and sardonic, benevolent and yet reserved, Jack Cradock stood at the edge of the deep well as the rough platform, slowly descending, carried the governor and young lady beyond his sight.
“What a lovely man!” said Gracie, appreciative.
“You heard that phrase in America!” was Evelyn’s comment.
They smiled at one another. The hubbub and brightness of the vast market vanished away above their heads. The lift shuddered and stopped. They were in silence and gloom. They were in a crypt. And the crypt was a railway station, vaster even than the Market, and seeming still vaster than it was by reason of the lowness of its roof.
“As big?” said the lift-attendant disdainfully in response to an enquiry. “It’s a lot bigger than Euston or St. Pancras or King’s Cross. If you ask me, it’s the longest station in London. ... No, the meat trains are all come and gone an hour ago.” An engine puffed slowly in the further obscure twilight. “No, that’s only some empties.”
Vague, dull sounds echoed under the roof: waggons being hauled to and fro by power-winches, waggons swinging round on turn-tables. Men like pigmies dotted the endless slatternly expanse. The untidy platforms were littered with packages: a crate of live fowls, a case of dead rabbits, a pile of tarpaulins. The pair walked side by side along a platform until they were held up by a chasm through which a waggon was being dragged by a hawser. When the chasm was covered again they walked on, right to the Aldersgate end of the station, whence the Farringdon Road end was completely invisible in the gloom. Neither spoke. Both were self-conscious.
“What are you thinking about?” Gracie asked curtly.
“If you want to know, I was thinking about that split ship of yours. And you?”
Gracie’s low, varied voice wavered as she replied:
“I was only thinking of those lambs, when they were in the fields, wagging their silly little tails while they sucked milk in.”
Evelyn saw the gleam of tears in her eyes. He offered no remark. Nervously Gracie pulled her cloak off and put it on her arm.
“It’s so hot. I mean I’m so hot,” she said.
She had indeed for a moment thought of the lambs. But the abiding sensation in her mind, in her heart and soul, was the sensation of the forlorn sadness of the deserted dark crypt, called by the unimaginative a railway station, and of the bright, jostling back-chatting world of men suspended over it on a magical system of steel girders. All the accomplishment of adventurous and determined laborious men—men whom her smart girl friends would not look twice at, because of the cut of their coats, or their accent, or their social deportment! She wanted ardently to be a man among men; she felt that she was capable of being a man among men. Her ideals, shaken before, were thrown down and smashed. She liked Evelyn for his sympathetic silence. She persuaded herself that he knew all her thoughts. By a shameless secret act, she tried to strip her mind to him, tear off every rag of decency, expose it to him, nude. And not a word said.
“Ah!” she reflected with a yearning. “His instinct for handling people! Could he handle me? Could he handle me?” ...
When they regained the surface, Jack Cradock was waiting for them. She was astounded to see by the market-clocks that the hour was after half-past six. Then something disturbingly went out. A whole row of electric lights in the broad arched roof of the central avenue! New shadows took the place of the old. She glanced at the roof. Grey light showed through its glass. Dawn had begun. Never in Gracie’s experience was a dawn so mysterious, so disconcerting, so heartrending. Jack Cradock was very amiable, respectful, self-respecting, and matter-of-fact.
Outside she resumed her dark cloak, tipped the policeman before Evelyn could do so, and slowly climbed into the car. She drove to the hotel slowly, not because of the increased traffic in the lightening streets, but as it were meditatively.
“I might write down my impressions of all that,” she murmured to Evelyn once, half-emerging for an instant from her meditation.
