Читать книгу Imperial Palace - Arnold Bennett - Страница 27

I

Evelyn entered the foyer at one minute to nine. Certainly one of his gods was Punctuality, though there were greater gods in his pantheon. When master of his movements he was never late, nor early; his knowledge of the hour, and of the minute of the hour, was almost continuous.

A thin stream of guests was passing from the great hall through the foyer into the restaurant. Other guests were sipping cocktails at the small tables in the foyer; and still others were seated on the sofas, contributing naught to the night’s receipts of the foyer, but safeguarding their stomachs. Not a single guest recognised Evelyn; Mr. Cousin would have been recognised and saluted by several of them; Evelyn’s personality was more recondite. Only the knowing ones knew that Mr. Cousin, the manager, had a superior.

In the lounge were two cloak-room attendants, knee-breeched and gorgeous, who looked as if they had escaped from the Court of the Prince Regent, two cocktail pages in white and gold, a foyer-waiter dressed as a waiter, and two head-waiters of the restaurant, who stood on the lower stairs to receive diners; for every arriving party was personally conducted to its table and not abandoned by the conductor until the head-waiter of the table had received it into his hands. All these employees were immediately and acutely aware of the unusual presence of Evelyn, but, under standing orders, they ignored it: not an easy feat.

At nine o’clock Sir Henry Savott appeared; he glanced at his watch, and his austere face betrayed a high consciousness that punctuality was the politeness of emperors. He descried Evelyn. The two smiled, mutually approached, shook hands, and as it were took positions for a duel.

“I was just going to telephone up to you, and suggest an appointment for to-morrow,” said Evelyn genially, “when I got your daughter’s most kind invitation.”

“Very good of you to accept at such short notice,” said Sir Henry. “Have a cocktail?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Evelyn simply, and indicated an empty table.

“What’s the matter with the bar?” asked Sir Henry. “I hear you’ve had it redecorated.”

“But Miss—er—Gracie?”

“Gracie has never been known to be less than a quarter of an hour late for lunch or dinner,” said Sir Henry. “Like most women she has a disorderly mind. Not disordered,” he added.

The two males exchanged a complacent, condescending look which relegated the entire female sex to its proper place, and strolled side by side up the stairs, along the broad corridor which led past the grill-room into the American bar.

The cocktail department comprised two large rooms: the first was permitted to ladies; the second, containing the majestic bar, was forbidden to them. By a common impulse Sir Henry and his guest for the evening walked without hesitation into the second room and sat down in a corner. Each waited for the other to open. Neither knew that the mind of the other was preoccupied with one sole image: that of Gracie. Evelyn was thinking: “She said she’d fix it, and she’s fixed it.” Sir Henry was thinking: “What’s the meaning of this whim for getting this fellow to dinner? . . . ‘Be still, and know that I am God.’ Good God!” (But naïve pride was mingled with his non-comprehension.)

Sir Henry glanced around with feigned curiosity at the flood-lighting, the silvern ceiling, the Joseph’s-coat walls decorated in rhomboidal shapes which bar-frequenters described as cubistic or futuristic or both. He did not like it.

“Very original,” he commented. “Charming. I expect it was good for a bit of useful publicity, this was.”

“It was,” said Evelyn. “Change from the traditional British bar, eh?” He saw himself and Gracie incredibly hobnobbing in the Prince of Wales’s Feathers in Westminster Bridge Road.

A white-jacketed, black-trousered youth ceremoniously approached.

“Maddix,” Evelyn murmured to him before Sir Henry could speak.

The youth hurried away.

There were four solemn revellers at the bar, and a priest and an acolyte behind it. The ascetic priest was a thin, short, middle-aged man with a semi-bald cranium, a few close-cropped grey hairs, and an enormous dome of a forehead above grey eyes. Leaving the bar and his customers to the care of the acolyte, the priest came tripping with dignity across the room and halted in silence at Evelyn’s elbow.

“Well, Maddix, what’s your latest? Apollo?” Evelyn asked, hardly smiling.

“The Apollo is quite new, sir. But my latest I’ve christened Green Parrot. I only really finished it last night.”

“Not on the market yet?”

“Not as you might say, sir.”

“Well, Sir Henry, will you try a Green Parrot?”

“Good evening, Sir Henry,” said Maddix, his tone a mixture of deference and self-respect.

“Why of course it’s Maddix!” Sir Henry exclaimed, holding out his hand. “How are you, Maddix? Haven’t seen you since God knows when—at the Plaza in New York. You were a very famous figure there.”

Maddix took the offered hand with reserve.

“Yes, sir,” he agreed placidly. “I suppose I was. I suppose I was the best-known barman in New York for twenty years. Prohibition and Mr. Orcham brought me back home.”

“And how are the boys?” Sir Henry enquired.

“Which boys, Sir Henry? The general bar population?”

“No. Your two sons of course.” A swift change transformed the impassive countenance of the legendary world-figure, the formidable man whose demeanour divided the general bar population of the two greatest capitals in history into two groups, the group which ventured to address him as ‘Maddix,’ with or without familiar additions, and the group which did not venture. The countenance relaxed and showed human emotion.

“Thank you for remembering them, Sir Henry. The eldest is still over there. Fur trade. Seems to be dollars in it. The other one’s with me and his mother, here.”

“And what’s he doing?”

“Well, Sir Henry, you may think it queer. But I’ve got a tennis-court back of my little house at Fulham, and the boy’s gone mad on tennis. He means to be a professional player. His mother isn’t very pleased. But I say, ‘What can you do—if he’s made up his mind?’ Between parents and children things aren’t what they used to be, are they, Sir Henry?”

“They are not,” the millionaire concurred, thinking of Gracie.

“A Green Parrot then, Sir Henry?”

“I’ll risk it.”

“And you, sir?”

Evelyn said:

“Soft.”

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Maddix. “I should prefer to mix that Green Parrot myself.” He went away.

“A character!” observed Sir Henry. “How did you manage to get him away from New York?”

“I saw him once or twice when I was over there,” Evelyn answered placidly. “He said he’d like to come home. I believed him. Considering Prohibition! A man who can live for twenty years behind a New York bar and never pick up an American accent—and never use a word of American slang—well, there must be something incurably English about him. I told him I had the finest American bar in the world, and I wanted the finest barman in the world to take charge of it. He came. Of course he gets the salary of an Under-Secretary of State. So he ought to.”

“Not quite the cocktail hour here, is it?” said Sir Henry, again glancing around at the large, half-empty room.

“No. It’s too late and too early. But it’ll soon be the liqueur hour. Extraordinary how many men prefer to come in here for a drink at the end of a meal. They feel more at home near a bar, even if they don’t stand at it.”