Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 8
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For the first ten minutes of waiting Evelyn forgave the girl. During the second ten minutes he grew resentful. It was just like these millionaires to assume that nothing really mattered except their own convenience. Did she suppose that he had risen at three-thirty for the delight of frittering away twelve, sixteen, nineteen irrecoverable minutes of eternity while she lolled around in her precious suite? Monstrous! Worse, he was becoming a marked man to Reyer, Long Sam, and the janissaries. They did not yet know that he was waiting for a girl; but they would know the moment she appeared and went off with him. Worse still, she was destroying the character with which he had privately endowed her. She arrived, smiling. And in an instant he had forgotten the twenty minutes, as one instantly forgets twenty days of bad weather when a fine day dawns.
“Sorry to keep you. Complications,” said she, with composure.
He wondered whether the complications had been caused by a forbidding father.
She had changed her hat, and put on a thin, dark, inconspicuous cloak.
The car was Leviathan. A landaulette body, closed. She opened one of its front-doors, and picked up a pair of loose gloves from the driver’s seat. An attendant janissary found himself forestalled, and had to stand unhelpful.
“Open?” she asked, in a tone expecting an affirmative answer.
“Rather.”
“No. I’ll do it. This is a one-girl hood. You might just wind down the window on your side.”
In ten seconds the car was open.
“But I’m going to sit by you,” said Evelyn.
She was lowering the glass partition behind the driver’s seat.
“Of course,” said she. “But I like it all open so that the wind can blow through.”
By the manner in which she manœuvred Leviathan out of the courtyard, which an early cleaner had encumbered with a long gushing hose-pipe, Evelyn knew at once that she was an expert of experts. In a moment they were in Birdcage Walk. In another moment they were out of Birdcage Walk, and slipping into Whitehall. In yet another moment they were in the Strand. It was still night. The sun had not given the faintest announcement to the revolving earth’s sombre eastern sky that he was mounting towards the horizon. There was an appreciable amount of traffic. She never hesitated, not for the fraction of a second. Her judgment was instantaneous and infallible. Her accelerations and decelerations, her brakings, could hardly be perceived. Formidable Leviathan was silent. Not a murmur beneath the bonnet. But what speed—in traffic! Evelyn saw the finger of the speedometer rise to forty—forty-two.
“Do you know the way?” he asked.
“I do,” she replied.
Strange that she should know the way to Smithfield.
Suddenly she said:
“What brought you into the hotel business?”
He replied as suddenly:
“The same thing that brought you to motoring. Instinct. I was always fond of handling people, and organising.”
“Always? Do you mean even when you were a boy?”
“Yes, when I was a boy. You know, clubs and things, and field-excursions. I managed the refreshment department at Earl’s Court one year. Then through some wine-merchant I got the management of the Wey Hotel at Weybridge. I rebuilt that. Then I had to add two wings to it.”
“But this present show of yours?”
“Oh! Well. They wanted a new manager here, and they sent for me. But I wouldn’t leave the Wey. So to get me they bought the Wey.”
“And what happened to the Wey?”
“Nothing. I’m still running it. Going down there this morning. Can’t go every day. When you’ve got the largest luxury hotel in the world on your hands——”
“The largest?”
“The largest.”
“Have you been to America? I thought in America——”
“Yes. All over America. I expected to learn a bit in America, but I didn’t. You mean those ‘2,000 bedrooms—2,000 bathrooms’ affairs. Ever stayed in one? No, of course you haven’t. Not your sort. Too wholesale and rough-and-ready. Not what we call luxury hotels. Rather behind the times. They haven’t got past ‘period’-furnishing. Tudor style. Jacobean style. Louis Quinze room. And so on. And as for bathrooms—well, they have to come to my ‘show’ to see bathrooms.”
He spoke as it were ruthlessly, but very simply and quietly. When she spoke she did not turn her head. She seemed to be speaking in a trance. He could examine her profile at his ease. Yes, she was beautiful.
II
At Ludgate Circus, a white-armed policeman was directing traffic under electric lamps just as in daylight.
“How funny!” she said, swinging round to the left so acutely that Evelyn’s shoulder touched hers.
In no time they would reach their destination. For this reason and no other he regretted the high speed. The fresh wind that precedes the dawn invigorated and sharpened all his senses. He recalled Dr. Johnson’s remark that he would be content to spend his life driving in a postchaise with a pretty woman. But the pretty woman would not have been driving. This girl was driving. She profoundly knew the job. Evelyn always had a special admiration for anybody who profoundly knew the job. She even knew the streets of commercial and industrial London. Before he was aware of it, the oddest thoughts shot through his mind.
“Her father might object. But I could handle her father. Besides—what a girl! Lovely, and can do something! No one who drives like her could possibly not have the stuff in her. I’ve never met anybody like her. She likes me. No nonsense about her! What a voice! Her voice is enough. It’s like a blooming orchestra, soft and soothing, but so.... Here! What’s this? What’s all this. It isn’t an hour since I met her. I’m the wildest idiot ever born. Marriage? Never. A mistress? Impossible. Neither she nor any other woman. The head of a ‘show,’ as she calls it, like mine with a mistress!”
He laughed inwardly, awaking out of a dream. And as he awoke he heard her beautiful voice saying, while her eyes stared straight ahead:
“What I admire in you is that you don’t act. I know you must be a pretty biggish sort of a man. Well, father’s pretty big—at least I’m always being told so—but father can’t help acting the big man, acting what he is. He’s always feeling what he is. You’re big and so you must know you’re big; but you just let it alone. It doesn’t worry you into acting the part. I know. I’ve seen lots of big men.”
“Oh!” murmured Evelyn, cautious, non-committal, and short of the right words. But he was thinking rapidly again: “And she hadn’t met me an hour ago! What a girl! No girl ever said anything as extraordinary as what she’s just said. And it’s true, what she says. Didn’t I see it in her father? I was afraid I might have seemed boastful, the way I talked about me and my ’show.’ But apparently she didn’t misunderstand me. Most girls would have misunderstood. Really she is a bit out of the ordinary.”
Smithfield Markets with their enclosed lighted avenues shone out twinkling in the near distance, on the other side of a large, dark, irregular open space of ground. Gracie glanced to right and left, decided where she would draw up, and, describing a long, evenly sustained curve, drew up in a quiet corner, slow, slower, slowest—motion expiring without a jar into immobility. She clicked the door and jumped down with not a trace of fatigue after a bedless night nearly ended. Her tongue said nothing, but her demeanour said: “And that’s that! That’s how I do it!”
“Well,” remarked Evelyn, still in the car. “You said something about me. I’ll say something about you. You can drive a car.”
Gracie answered: “I don’t drive any more.”
“What do you mean—you don’t drive any more?”
“I mean race-track driving. I’ve given it up. This isn’t driving.”
“Had an accident?”
“An accident? No! I’ve never touched a thing in my life. But I might have done. I thought it wasn’t good enough—the risk. So I gave it up. I thought I might as well keep the slate clean.” She smiled ingenuously, smoothing her cloak.
“And what a slate! What a nerve to retire like that!” Evelyn reflected, and said aloud: “You’re amazing!” He had again the sensation of the romantic quality of life. He was uplifted high.
“So here we are,” said Gracie, suddenly matter-of-fact.
A policeman strolled into the vicinity.
“Can I leave my car here, officer?” she questioned him briskly, authoritatively.
The policeman paused, peering at her in the dying night.
“Yes, miss.”
“It’ll be quite safe?”
“I’ll keep an eye on it, miss.”
“Thank you.”
Evelyn, accustomed to take charge of all interviews, parleys, and pow-wows, had to be a silent spectator. As he led her into the Market, he trembled at the prospect of the excitement, secret and overt, which her appearance would cause there.
