Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 15

II

But when the lift had taken her up out of sight, he thought, though lightly: “Who does she think she is, cheeking me, after inviting herself to Smithfield and all that? Never saw her in my life until this morning, and she has the nerve to call me a child!” Nevertheless, her impudent remark did please him. He indeed admitted, proudly, that he was a child—one part of him, which part had carelessly forgotten to grow up.

The mishap with the turnstiles was prominent in his mind. The organisation of the hotel was divided into some thirty departments, and the head of each had a fixed conviction that his department was the corner-stone of the success of the hotel. Evelyn, Machiavellian, impartially supported every one of these convictions, just as he consistently refrained from discouraging the weed of interdepartmental jealousies inevitably sprouting from time to time in the soil of strenuous emulation which he was always fertilising. Thus the head floors-waiter did not conceal his belief that the room-service was the basis of prosperity; the restaurant-manager knew that the restaurant was the life-blood of the place; the manager of the grill-room was not less sure that the grill, where at lunch and at supper the number of celebrities and notorieties far surpassed that of the restaurant (though it cost the hotel not a penny for bands), was the chief factor of prosperity; the audit-manager was aware that without his department the hotel would go to hell in six months; the bills-manager had no need to emphasise his supremacy; the head of the Reception, who could draw from memory a plan of every room with every piece of furniture in it, and who knew by sight and name and number every guest, and had a file-record of every guest, including the dubious, with particulars of his sojourns, desires, eccentricities, rate of spending, payments—even to dishonoured cheques, who could be welcoming, non-committal, cool, cold and ever tactful in five languages—this marvel had never a doubt as to the identity of the one indispensable individual in the hierarchy of the hotel. And so on.

And there were others—especially those mightinesses the French, Italian and Viennese chefs. Evelyn always remembered the ingenuous, sincere remark of the chief engineer, who passed his existence in the lower entrails of our revolving planet, where daylight was utterly unknown. “You see those things,” the chief engineer had said to a visitor. “If they shut up, the blessed hotel would have to shut right up.” ‘Those things’ were the boilers, which made the steam, which actuated the engines, which drew the water from the artesian wells, made the electric light and the electric power, heated the halls, restaurants and rooms, froze or chilled perishable food, baked the bread, cooked the meat, boiled the vegetables, cleansed and dried the very air, did everything except roast the game over a wood fire.

Evelyn had admitted, to himself, the claim to pre-eminence of the chief engineer. But now he began to wonder whether the turnstile and clocking-in satrap was not entitled to precedence over even the chief engineer. For if the hotel depended on the engine-hall the engine-hall depended on the presence of its workmen. He smiled at the fanciful thought as he descended by tiled and concrete slopes and narrow iron staircases, glimpsing non-uniformed humble toilers of both sexes in soiled, airless rooms and enclosures, towards the cave of the staff-manager’s second-in-command who watched and permitted or forbade the entrances and exits of thirteen hundred employees.

The cave was a room of irregular shape, full of machines and pigeon-holes and cognate phenomena. The second-in-command, a dignified and authoritative specimen of the middle-class aged fifty or so, sat on one side of a counter. On the other side stood a young woman starting on her day out, dressed and hatted and shod and powdered and rouged for the undoing or delight of some young male: in her working-hours a chambermaid. Between them, on the counter, lay a despatch-case, on which the girl kept a gloved hand.

“You can’t leave with that thing until I’ve seen inside it,” said authority.

“But why? It’s mine.”

“How long have you been here? Not long, eh?”

“A month.”

“Well, when you’ve been here a month of Sundays you’ll have got into your head that nobody can take anything out of here without me seeing what it is.”

“I call it a wicked shame.”

“It may be. But it’s the rule of the hotel. Last year I caught a girl slipping out with a pair of sheets where they oughtn’t to be.”

“This despatch-case won’t hold a pair of sheets,” said the girl. “Anyone can see that.”

Authority made no reply, but glanced inquisitively at a small group of men who were clocking in. The girl sulkily opened the despatch-case. Authority looked into it.

“That necklace yours?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it from?”

“A lady gave it me.”

“What floor? What number? What name? Is she still here?”

Question and answer; question and answer.

“Off you go,” said authority, having written down the details on the slip-permit which the girl had handed to him: “You’ll know next time.”

Off the girl went, haughtily. Evelyn felt sorry for her, as he emerged from the doorway where he had been listening to the encounter.

“Good morning, sir.” Authority had suddenly changed to subservience.

“I hear you had some trouble with the turnstiles this morning, Maxon,” said Evelyn benevolently.

“Trouble, sir? Turnstiles?” replied subservience, as if quite at a loss to understand the sinister allusion.

“Yes. Some charwomen were kept waiting.”

“Oh! I see what you mean, sir. That wasn’t turnstiles, sir. They’ve told you wrong. I’ll show you what it was.” Subservience sprang round the counter.

The two bent together over a steel contraption, and subservience explained.

“No turnstiles about that, sir. Clocking.”

“Why didn’t you let ’em through, for once?” Evelyn asked.

“Well, sir, I thought I should get it right every minute. Only a touch. And it wasn’t long. It wasn’t above five minutes. And it won’t happen again. And if it does happen again, and it’s your wish, sir——”

Evelyn changed the subject. After some general chat, whose sole object was to indicate to the excellent Maxon that Maxon enjoyed his special regard, he departed, having first jotted a reminding note for himself. The rule about outgoing packages irked his feeling for decency. But it was absolutely necessary. There was simply no end to the running of a hotel. How would Gracie Savott have behaved if confronted with the rule? A certain liveliness for authority! She was getting into bed now. Nothing had been said as to a further meeting.