Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 21

I

The already famous Imperial Palace Hotel Laundry occupied part of a piece of freehold ground in a broad, tram-enlivened street in Kennington. The part unbuilt upon was a rather wild garden in which were many flowers. Evelyn foresaw the time when the Laundry would have to be enlarged, and the garden would cease to be. But at present the garden flourished and bloomed, and work-girls were taking their tea and bread-and-butter in it under the bright, warm September sun.

The spectacle of the garden and the lolling, lounging, tea-spilling work-girls delighted Evelyn on his arrival that afternoon, as it always delighted him. He would point out to visitors the curving flagged paths, the scientifically designed benches, the pond with authentic goldfish gliding to and fro therein, and the vine. The vine bore grapes, authentic grapes. True, they were small, hard, sour and quite uneatable, but they were grapes, growing in the open air of Kennington, within thirty feet of roaring, red trams. He was perhaps prouder of the garden as a pleasance for work-girls than of the Laundry itself. He had created the Laundry. He had not designed the buildings nor the machinery, nor laid brick on brick nor welded pipe to pipe, nor dug the Artesian wells nor paved the yards. But he had thought the whole place and its efficiency and its spirit into being—against some opposition from his Board of Directors.

It was a success. It drew over half a million gallons of water a week from the exhaustless wells; it often used six thousand gallons of water in an hour. It employed over two hundred immortal souls, chiefly the enigmatic young feminine. It fed these girls. It taught them to sing and to act and to dance and to sew and to make frocks. It kept a doctor and a dentist and a nurse for them. It washed all the linen of the Imperial Palace and the Wey hotels and all the linen that the hotel guests chose to entrust to it. It served also three hundred private customers, and its puce-tinted motor-vans were beginning to be recognised in the streets. It paid ten per cent. on its capital, and, with the aid of the latest ingenuities of American and English machinery, it was estimated to increase the life of linen by one-third. And considering the price of linen. . . . Americans who inspected the Imperial Palace Hotel Laundry said that while there were far larger laundries in the United States, there was no laundry comparable with Evelyn’s, either industrially or socially. Evelyn believed them. What he had difficulty in realising was that without his own creative thought and his perseverance in face of obstruction, the Laundry would never have existed. To him it always had the air of a miracle. Such as it was, it was his contribution towards the millennium, towards a heaven on earth.

As he entered the precincts a few of the uniformed girls smiled diffidently to greet him, and he smiled back and waved his stick, and passed into the building. He was a quarter of an hour late, but this lamentable fact did not disturb him. For he had done over four hours’ concentrated hard work down at Weybridge. He had telephoned for the architect and for the principal partner of the contracting firm of builders, and they had both obeyed the summons. He and they and the manager of the Wey had measured, argued, eaten together, argued again and measured again, and finally by dint of compromises had satisfactorily emerged from a dilemma which, Evelyn softly maintained, commonsense and foresight ought to have been able to avoid. Oh yes, he awarded part of the blame to himself! He had quitted the Wey in triumph. He had left the manager thereof in a state of worshipping relief, and the architect and the contractor in a state of very deferential admiration. He was content with Evelyn Orcham. A hefty fellow, Evelyn Orcham!

The one stain on the bright day was that he had settled nothing in his mind on the way down about the Miss Brury calamity; and on the way up to London he had been too excited by his achievement in the suburb to think about anything else. (Assuredly he was not completely grown up.) However, there was time enough yet to think constructively upon the Miss Brury calamity. He was conscious of endless reserves of energy, and as soon as he had dealt with the simmering trouble at the Laundry he would seize hold of the Palace problem and shake it like a rat!

And there stood Cyril Purkin, the manager of the Laundry, in the doorway leading to the staff dining-room. A short, fairly thin figure; a short but prominent pawky nose; small, cautious, ‘downy,’ even suspicious eyes; light ruffled hair; and a sturdy, half-defiant demeanour. A Midlander, aged thirty-eight, Evelyn sometimes wondered where the man bought his suits. They were good and well-fitting suits, but they had nothing whatever of a West End cut. The origin of his very neat neckties was similarly a mystery to Evelyn. His foot was small and almost elegant.

Mr. Purkin had begun life as a chemical engineer; he had gone on to soap-making, then laundry management, then soap-making again, then laundry management again. One day, when the foundations of the Imperial Palace Hotel Laundry had hardly been laid, Evelyn had received a letter which began: “Sir,—Having been apprised that you are about to inaugurate a laundry on modern lines, I beg respectfully to offer my services as manager. I am at present . . .” The phrasing of the letter was succinct, the calligraphy very precise, regular and clear, and the signature just as formal as the rest of the writing. The letter attracted Evelyn. How had the man been clever enough to get himself ‘apprised’ of the advent of a new laundry on modern lines? And how came he to have the wit to write to Evelyn personally? Evelyn’s name was never given out as the manager of the Imperial Palace. Mr. Purkin’s qualifications proved to be ample; his testimonials were beyond cavil. His talk in conversation was intelligent, independent, very knowledgeable; and he had strong notions concerning the ‘welfare’ side of laundries, which notions specially appealed to Evelyn. He was engaged. He gave immense satisfaction. His one weakness was that he was the perfect man, utterly expert, utterly reliable, superhuman.

He was still the chemical engineer. He seldom mentioned sheets, chemises, collars, towels, stockings, and such-like common concrete phenomena. He would discourse upon the ‘surface tension’ of water, ‘breaking down,’ albumen, ‘Base Exchange,’ centrifugal cleansing, the sequence of waters, ‘residual alkalis,’ chlorine, warps and woofs, ‘efflorescence,’ etc., etc. He had established a research department, in which he was the sole worker.

As he deferentially shook hands with the great man his attitude said:

“Of course you are my emperor, but between ourselves I am as good as you, and you know it, and you know also that I have always delivered the goods.”

And yet somewhere behind Mr. Purkin’s shrewd little eyes there was something of the defensive as well as of the sturdy defiant, together with a glimmering of an uneasy consciousness that he had not always delivered the goods and that he too was imperfect—through no fault of his own.

“I must really show you this, sir,” said he, introducing Evelyn into the small managerial room where on the desk lay a pile of examination papers. “Question,” he read out, picking up a paper, “ ‘Why are white fabrics blued in order to procure a general appearance of whiteness?’ Answer: ‘White fabrics are blued because there are more yellow rays in the spectrum, and we use blue to counteract the yellow rays.’ Wouldn’t you say, sir, that that’s rather well and tersely put for a girl of sixteen and a half? These exam papers are useful as an index to character as well as to attainments.”

Evelyn heartily agreed, and for courtesy’s sake glanced at the paper.

“I see you’ve got all the painting finished,” said he. “Looks much better.”

“Ah!” replied Mr. Purkin. “Ah! I must show you one thing that I thought of. An idea I had, and I’ve carried it out.”

He drew Evelyn into the Laundry itself, walking with short, decided steps. They passed through two large and lofty interiors filled with machines and with uniformed girls (the girls did not all have their tea simultaneously), girls ironing, girls folding, girls carrying, girls sorting, amid steel in movement, heat, moisture, and a general gleaming whiteness. He halted, directing Evelyn’s attention to a row of pipes near the ceiling, painted in different colours.

“Red for hot water, blue for cold water, yellow for steam. The three primary colours. When a minor repair is necessary it isn’t always easy to tell at a glance everywhere which pipe is which. By this system you can’t make a mistake. Costs no more. I thought you’d approve.”

“Brilliant,” said Evelyn. “Brilliant. I congratulate you.” Possibly a trace of derision in Evelyn’s benevolent laudatory tone.

“And there’s the new drier,” Mr. Purkin continued, and led his chief to a room where two women, one mature, overblown and beautiful, and the other young but as plain as a suet pudding, were working in a temperature of 119 degrees. Evelyn had to admire and marvel again. Nor was that the end of the tour of novelties. Mr. Purkin’s ingenuity and his passion for improvements were endless. And as Evelyn went from table to table and from machine to machine and from group to group of girls, busy either individually or in concert, and from pile to growing or lessening pile of linen, and as he sought for the private lives and the characters of girls in the lowered, intent faces of girls, he sardonically thought: “This chap is putting off the fatal moment on purpose. And doing it very well too. Creating all this atmosphere of approval. Damn clever fellow! Pity he isn’t clever enough to see that I can see through him.”

But, back in Mr. Purkin’s prim, stuffy, excessively neat little office, the Midlander boldly summoned the moment.

“I’m glad you were able to come to-day, sir, because I was getting anxious for you to see for yourself we aren’t standing still here. I know you’re always interested, very interested, but we like to see you here, all of ’em like to see you. It makes us all feel that we kind of ‘belong.’ . . . Oh! Upon my word, I was forgetting to tell you that the number of pieces from private customers passed the twenty thousand mark last week—at last. You’ll receive the figures to-morrow.”

“Good! Good! You always said it would.”

“But there was another thing I wanted to see you about.”

“Oh!” Evelyn exclaimed, feigning ignorance.

“Yes. About those frilled dress-shirts last Thursday.”

“Oh! That!”

“Yes,” continued Mr. Purkin. “Yes, sir. You may have forgotten, but I can assure you that I haven’t.”

Now the affair of the frilled shirts was one of those molehills which are really mountains. In a few hours it had swollen itself into a Mont Blanc. A guest who was a public character and who had been staying at the Palace for weeks and spending quite a lot of money, had complained about the ironing of his frilled evening shirts. Mrs. O’Riordan herself had taken the matter up. Mrs. O’Riordan had given her word that the frilled shirts should be ironed to the owner’s satisfaction, and at the end of ten days Mrs. O’Riordan had redeemed her word. Triumph for the hotel. Smiles from the guest. And for Mr. Immerson, the hotel’s Publicity-manager, material for one or two piquant newspaper paragraphs. On the last day of his sojourn the guest had reached the state of being convinced that his celebrated frilled shirts had never been so perfectly done before. No laundry like the Imperial Palace Hotel Laundry! His desire was to leave the Palace with the largest possible stock of frilled shirts ironed by its Laundry. “Can I rely on having these three shirts back to-night?” he had asked. Of course! Could he doubt it? Was it not a basic principle of the Laundry that all linen consigned in the morning was delivered absolutely without fail the same evening? It was.

But the unique shirts had not been delivered, and the next morning the guest, disillusioned, wounded, inconsolable, had had to depart without them. A child disappointed of a promised toy, a religionist whose faith has been suddenly struck from under him, could not have exhibited more woe than the deceived guest. True, the shirts were sent after him by air-mail to Paris and got there first. But inefficiency remained inefficiency; and the Laundry’s lapse had shocked every housekeeper at the Palace. The foundations of the Palace had for an instant trembled. The unimaginative individuals who snorted that three shirts ought not to be enough to shake the foundations of a nine-storey building simply did not understand that such edifices as the Imperial Palace were not built with hands.

Evelyn had by no means forgotten the affair. A minor purpose of his visit to Kennington had indeed been to get to the bottom of it. He knew that Mr. Purkin guessed this, and that Mr. Purkin knew that Evelyn knew that he guessed. Nevertheless the two men continued to pretend.

“I was under the impression that it had been explained,” said Evelyn. “You had only one girl who specialised in these preposterous shirts, and she was taken ill or something at the very moment when your need of her was most desperate.”

“No, sir,” said Mr. Purkin with brave candour, “the matter has not been explained—to you; at least not satisfactorily. The girl, Rose, was not taken ill. She merely walked out and left us in the lurch. We have the best class of girls here. I remember when laundry staffs had to be recruited from riff-raff. We’ve altered all that, by improving the conditions. I knew Rose; I thought highly of her; I knew her father, a house-painter, most respectable. And yet she walks out! She’ll never walk in again, I may say, not as long as I’m manager here. Naturally I got the shirts done, in a way, next morning. But that’s not the point.”

The drama of Mr. Purkin’s deep but restrained indignation genuinely affected Evelyn. It seemed to produce vibrations in the physical atmosphere of the office.

“What a man!” thought Evelyn appreciatively. “Such loyalty to the I.P.H.L. is priceless. Of course his sense of proportion’s a bit askew; but you can’t have everything.” He said aloud gently: “Why did this Rose walk out?”

“Ah!” replied Mr. Purkin. “I will tell you, sir.” He went to a file-cabinet, and chose a card from two or three hundred cards, and offered it to Evelyn. “That’s why she walked out.”

On the card was a chart of the wicked girl’s mouth, of her upper jaw and her lower jaw. “Look at it, Mr. Orcham. You see the number of bad teeth on it. I ordered her the dentist. She made an excuse twice—something about her mother’s wishes; I’m certain it wasn’t the father. As you know better than anyone, every girl who’s engaged by me here has to promise she’ll allow us to keep her in good health, mother or no mother. On that afternoon I told her I’d made an appointment for her with the dentist for the next morning, and that she positively must keep it. I spoke very quietly. Well, as soon as my back is turned, out of this Laundry she walks! Without notice! Of course it was the staff-manageress’s business to see to it. But as she had failed twice, I had to take the matter up myself. No alternative. Discipline is discipline. And just look at the charts of that mouth!”

“Quite!” said Evelyn. He was laughing, but not visibly. “Quite!”

“The truth is,” Mr. Purkin continued, “there would have been no bother—I’m sure of it—if only I’d had a little more moral support.”

At this point Mr. Purkin pulled out his cigarette-case and actually offered it to the panjandrum. Probably no other member of the Palace staff, no matter how exalted, with the possible exception of Mr. Cousin, would have ventured upon such a familiarity with Evelyn. But Mr. Purkin was exceedingly if secretly perturbed, and the offering of a cigarette to the great man was his way of trying to conceal his perturbation; it was also a way of demonstrating the Purkinian conviction that he was as good as anybody—even Evelyn.

“Thanks,” said Evelyn, taking a cigarette, not because he did not fear Mr. Purkin’s cigarettes, but because he sympathetically understood the manager’s motive—or the first part of it. “You mean support from the staff-manageress?”

“I mean Miss—er,” muttered Mr. Purkin, and he blushed. He would have given a vast sum not to blush; but he blushed, this pawky, self-confident, disciplinary Midlander. He had opened his mouth with the intention of boldly saying Miss Violet Powler, the staff-manageress’s name; but his organs of speech, basely betraying him, refused their office. A few seconds of restraint ensued.

“Sex!” thought Evelyn. “Sex! Here it is again.”

He did not object to sex as a factor in the problems of a great organism. He rather liked it. And he knew that anyhow it was and must be a factor ever recurring in those problems. He had heard, several months earlier, that an ‘affair’ was afoot between Mr. Purkin and Violet Powler. How did these rumours get abroad? He could not say. Nobody could say. In the present case a laundry-girl might have seen a gesture or a glance, or caught a tone—nothing, less than nothing—as the manager and the staff-manageress passed together through the busy rooms. The laundry-girl might have mentioned it slyly to another laundry-girl. The rumour is born. The rumour spreads with the rapidity of fire, or of an odour, or of influenza. It rises from stratum to stratum of the social structure. Finally it reaches the august ear of Evelyn himself. For it could not be lost; it could not die; and it could not cease to rise till it could rise no higher.

Evelyn had gathered that the affair was a subject for merriment, that people regarded as comic the idea of amorous tenderness between the manager and the staff-manageress of the Laundry. In his own mind he did not accept this view. To him there was something formidable, marvellous, and indeed beautiful in the mystic spectacle of Aphrodite springing from the hot dampness of the Laundry and lodging herself in the disciplinary soul of Cyril Purkin. Nor did he foresee harm to the organism in the marriage of Cyril and Violet.

“I wouldn’t say one word against her,” said Mr. Purkin, exerting all his considerable powers of self-control. “I chose her out of scores, and probably a better woman for the job of staff-manageress couldn’t be found. But in this matter—and in one or two others similar—I’m bound to admit I’ve been a bit disappointed. Discipline is the foundation of everything here, and if it isn’t enforced, where are you? I’m bound to say I don’t quite see . . . She’s inclined to be very set in her views.” He lifted his eyebrows, implying imminent calamity.

“Curse this sex!” thought Evelyn. “She’s refused him. Or they’ve had a row. Or something else has happened. He wants her to go. He’ll make her go. He can’t bear her here. She’s on his nerves. But he’s still in love with her, even if he doesn’t know it. What a complication! How the devil can you handle it? Curse this sex!”

But he was moved by the sudden disclosure of Mr. Purkin’s emotion, and he admired Mr. Purkin’s mastery of it. He had never felt more esteem for the man than just then.

Mr. Purkin lit both cigarettes, and the pair talked, without too closely gripping the thorns of the situation.

“Well,” said Evelyn at length gently. “We’d better leave things for a while. If I do get a chance perhaps I might have a chat with Miss Powler——”

“Well, Mr. Orcham, if anybody can do anything you can.” But Mr. Purkin’s accents gave a clue to his private opinion that not even Mr. Orcham could do anything.

Soon afterwards Evelyn left, saying that he would ‘see.’ For the moment he could not ‘see.’ As he walked away, the last batch of girls was quitting the garden. He got into his car.

“Home.”

Brench touched his hat.

“Wait,” said Evelyn suddenly, and descended from the car.