Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 23

I

Evelyn’s car had not moved three hundred yards from the Laundry before it was stopped by an oncoming car which sinfully swerved across the street, threatening a bonnet-to-bonnet collision. Fortunately this amazing and inexcusable assault took place in a fairly empty space of road. Evelyn did not at first realise what had happened. His chauffeur, grandly conscious of being in the right, and with a strong sex-bias which had persuaded him that women-drivers were capable of any enormity, sat impassive and even silent, prepared to await developments and a policeman.

Evelyn put his head out of his saloon window. The driver of the other car smiled and waved a hand freely. It was Gracie Savott. Gracie backed her car a few feet and then swerved forward again to her proper side and drew up at the kerb. Evelyn, fully sharing for the moment Brench’s sex-bias, got down and walked across the street between approaching trams to Gracie’s car.

“I’ve written all my impressions of Smithfield,” she gaily called out to him as he passed in front of her and gained the security of the pavement.

Evelyn was startled by her astonishing performance with the car, and so resentful, that he could hardly bring himself to raise his hat.

“Was it to tell me that that you stopped me?” he asked stiffly. (By heaven, what next?)

“Don’t crush me.” She pouted.

“How did you know it was my car?” The second question was softer than the first.

“That’s nicer,” she said, smiling.

He thought that her tone was damned intimate. But fairness made him immediately admit to himself that his own brusque tone had set the example of precocious intimacy.

Gracie said:

“I asked the number of your car before I left the hotel. How else? And I was about five minutes in getting it. They told me you’d probably be at the Laundry, and they gave me the address. I had an instinct I might meet you on the way; that was why I asked the number. And a good thing I did!”

Evelyn’s resentment was now submerged by a complete bewilderment. Was the girl pursuing him, and if so to what end? His bewilderment in turn was lost in dismay, in alarm for the demi-god Orcham’s reputation. What would his staff think of this young woman demanding his whereabouts and the number of his car? What could the staff think? He had been first seen with her at 4 a.m. All the upper grades of the staff must have heard that he had escorted her to Smithfield, brought her back, shown her the ground-floor of the hotel at early morn. And now she had been recklessly betraying an urgent desire to chase him, run him to earth, and capture him! She, a girl, a notorious racing-motorist! Him, the sedate, staid panjandrum of the Palace! It was incredible, unthinkable, inconceivable. The whole hotel must be humming like telegraph-wires with the scandalous tidings. Could he re-enter the hotel without self-consciousness?

Clever of her to think of obtaining the number of the car before starting! . . . Had she really intended to enquire for him at the Laundry? And why? What was her business? And if her business was so cursedly urgent, hadn’t she enough ordinary gumption to telephone? She was evidently an adventuress—in the sense that she loved adventure for its own sake. She was a wild girl. Had she not positively invited him, a stranger, to take her to Smithfield?

“Is anything the matter?” he asked.

“Not yet. But I must talk to you.”

“Well?”

“Not here. We can’t talk here,” she said. “And not at the hotel either.”

“Certainly not at the hotel,” he silently agreed. And aloud: “Where, then?”

“If you’ll get in——”

“But what about my car?”

“Send it home. I’d come with you in your car, but I can’t leave mine here in the street, can I?”

Mist was gathering in South London. Dusk was falling. Trams with their ear-shattering roar swept by, looming larger than life in the vagueness of the mist.

Evelyn crossed the road again.

“I shan’t want you any more to-night,” he said with an exaggerated nonchalance to Brench.

The imperturbable man touched his cap, and glided away.

“She looks a bit better now. I’ve had her cleaned,” said Gracie as she curved her own car into a side-street in order to turn back eastwards.

She was wearing the leather coat, and loose gloves to match it. She pushed the car along at great speed among the traffic, driving with all the assured skill of which Evelyn had had experience twelve hours earlier in the day. Once again he was at her side. A few minutes ago he had been in the prosaic industrial environment of the hotel Laundry. And now he was under the adventurous hands of this incalculable girl on another earth. He felt as helpless as a piece of flotsam in some swift shadowy tide-way of that other earth. His masculinity rebelled, asserted itself. He must somehow get control of the situation.

“Well?” he repeated, uncompromisingly.

“Not yet.” Second time she had used those mysterious words. “I know a place.” Still more mysterious! And there was nothing the matter ‘yet’!

Evelyn’s thought was: “What has to be will be.”

Philosophical? Worthy of a man? No! Only a pretence of the philosophical. As for Gracie, she uttered not a syllable more. She drove and drove.

In Westminster Bridge Road a large public-house gleamed in the twilight. It had just opened to customers, and Labour was passing through its swing-doors. And through the doors, and through the windows, frosted into a pattern, could be seen glimpses of mahogany and glazed interiors, with counters and bottles and beer-handles and shabby tipplers of both sexes, and barmen in shirt-sleeves rolled up. The public-house stood on a corner. Gracie twisted the car round the corner and stopped it, opposite a protruding sign which said “Shades.”

“Here it is,” said Gracie, with a slight movement towards him which indicated that he was expected to get out of the car.

“Here?” he questioned.

“Yes.”

“Do you know the place?” he questioned further.

“No. But I happened to notice it as I drove down. It calls itself the Prince of Wales’s Feathers.”

“Do you mean you want to go in here?”

“Yes. To talk. Why not? We couldn’t have a safer place.”

Evelyn had never entered a London public-house. He shrugged his shoulders—those shoulders which she had admired. His faculty of amazement was worn out. He descended. Gracie locked the steering. Then she glanced into the body of the car. Nothing there to tempt thieves.

“That ought to be all right,” she murmured.